Quartz unleashes the bots — as a journo's assistant

There’s been a lot of focus on bots — chat bots in particular — as news delivery vehicles. How about using them as news? Well, Quartz has something rather lovely coming for you:

At the Online News Association conference next month, Quartz plans to unveil a suite of Slack-based tools designed to simplify the process of creating bots to follow certain pages or data. With the tool, a local crime reporter, could, for example, create a bot that monitors the local police department’s website and alerts them whenever there’s an update. Technology and finance reporters could do the same with bots that monitor SEC filings.

Best of all, their work has been funded by the Knight Foundation to the tune of $250,000.

We don’t spend nearly enough time training journalists in how to use digital tools to streamline and speed up the story-gathering process, leaving us with more time to do the human elements of reporting. This has the potential to be a great set of tools that can make every reporter’s life that bit simpler.