Shelley Seale is a journalist, content creator, award-winning writer, author, publication designer, editor and communications professional. She can be reached at www.shelleyseale.com. and Twitter
What’s Happening:
At The New York Times, a bot was built and then re-tuned that allowed writers and editors to monitor Reddit conversations around their content, get real-time feedback from the community and even join the conversation. The tool alerted the newsroom via a Slack channel.
Why it Matters:
Reddit community conversations can be an important tool for digital publishers to engage with their audiences. While the Slack bot monitoring Reddit conversations had been helpful for the Times, the Perl code was outdated. To update it so it could be used with Google services, the team used Maker Day, along with infrastructure tools such as Google App Engine.
