In the evolving realm of journalism as technology is reshaping the landscape, a tool has emerged that its creators see as a bridge between tradition and innovation.
Stylebot, a copy editing plug-in compatible with Slack, Microsoft Teams and Google Chrome, offers a way, they say, to adhere to style guides in the digital age.
At the forefront of this innovation is Laura Davis, a seasoned journalist and educator at her alma mater, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Her mission, she says, is to address the challenges in newsroom workflows and editing processes.
Davis’s early career took her through various digital and tech roles at renowned media outlets, such as the Associated Press, Yahoo News, the Los Angeles Times and Buzzfeed. However, she always carried with her a deep appreciation for the intricate world of style guides and says she was often the “resident style nerd” among her colleagues.
As newsroom workflows evolved, Davis says she found herself facing new challenges, particularly in the realm of copy editing.
“I was taught in journalism school [that] copy editors write your headline. You [reporters] don’t write your headline,” says Davis. “Then I went into the world, and I was sharing things on social media before it even went through the copy desk. The workflow just wasn’t set up.”
Davis transitioned from the newsroom to the classroom about a decade ago.
At Buzzfeed, she was approached about teaching full-time at Annenberg: USC needed someone to oversee digital for a new student newsroom, putting the website, TV and radio under one roof as a converged newsroom.
“I was recruited for that role and, ultimately, decided to take it,” says Davis.
Her commitment to equipping young journalists with the necessary copy editing skills became even more pronounced, she says, when she took charge of the digital arm of the new student newsroom.
“When you’re publishing on multiple platforms instantaneously as a journalist, you need to be responsible,” Davis says. “You cannot rely on somebody else with expertise in copy editing to look at every single piece of content before it goes out.”
While at the LA Times, Davis had bonded over copyediting with the late Henry Fuhrmann, who served in many roles, including as Calendar section copy editor and eventually assistant managing editor. When Fuhrmann retired in 2015, Davis recruited him as an adjunct to help run the student newsroom.
“I kept seeing the same copy mistakes showing up again and again,” says Davis. “I was feeling frustrated about it, so at first I just took stylebooks and put them on students’ desks. I’m like, ‘Okay, they’ll see this and they’ll remember and they’ll do it.’ Then I saw that wasn’t working.”
Driven by a desire to address recurring copy mistakes, Davis and Fuhrmann enlisted the help of faculty colleagues, Jenn de la Fuente and Edward Lifson and started building out a newsroom style guide.
“We decided to try putting a bot on Slack that could answer those [style] questions, and it really just kind of took off in our newsroom. The students loved it,” Davis says. “At first, I saw it as just a project for our newsroom.”
It became something more than that after they graduated, she says.
“A couple students emailed me and they were like, ‘Can I use Stylebot in my newsroom?'”
In 2020, Stylebot evolved into an independent company and has since helped various nonprofit newsrooms and startups, such as CalMatters, NowThis News, and Deseret News, in streamlining their editing processes, she says. Stylebot has other journalism schools among its clientele, including Syracuse and The Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, Davis says.
“We now offer customization for newsrooms because once we started talking to more newsrooms and people about their editing problems, we found that all their style resources are not always in one place,” says Davis. “We thought that was a need we could meet.”
Stylebot builds on what style rules are already established, Davis says.
“What we’re doing is adding to their resources, because we have things that they might not address in their style guide,” says Davis. “We basically combine the resources so it will answer with their style. But if they don’t address a question and we do, they’ll get our answer, as long as our answer also doesn’t violate any of the other style rules.”
Stylebot is not generative AI. According to Davis, the answers users see are all human written to ensure a balance between technology and journalistic values.
“I say that our tool is AI enabled, because it uses machine learning and natural language processing,” says Davis. “Journalists are excited about the future and wanna embrace the technology, but also are aware of the limitations at this point.”
Her platform bridges that gap, she says, noting: “We still use a lot of human judgment and curation with Stylebot.”
Having a consistent and clear style is crucial for a newsroom’s credibility, Davis says, and this principle is at the heart of Stylebot’s mission.
“Style guides are the soul of a newsroom,” says Davis. “It’s part of what makes – especially when we’re thinking about today’s media landscape – a style guide is part of what makes a newsroom or journalism stand out from other kinds of media because the standards and the practices of journalists are what distinguishes them from somebody just posting content on social media.”
Stylebot is updated every other week, with more guidance on AI added recently.
“On a lot of these broader issues with journalism, we do try to be a first line of defense in terms of if somebody does have a question around those ethics and whatnot. And then when news organizations have their own more specific policies, we’ll do that in their custom version,” says Davis.
The Stylebot team is fairly small, consisting of Davis, co-founder and CTO Vishal Saberwal, and Customer Editor Katherine Wiles. Initially, Davis received grant funding from USC to develop the Annenberg style guide that powers Stylebot.
“We hire research associates who help us work on the Annenberg style guide as well, and those are grant funded. We’ve also raised a small what I call ‘pre-seed’ of outside funding, and it’s also been bootstrapped.”
Davis says Stylebot was created “by journalists for journalists,” to “make the editing process easier, faster and more fun.” Ultimately, she hopes, Stylebot can be a way of getting editing and style practices and values to more people producing content for a variety of audiences.
“In my work as a journalism professor, I’m teaching a general education seminar right now about the changing media landscape and how young consumers are gonna have to contend with figuring out finding factual information online,” says Davis. “Newsrooms aren’t going anywhere, but the reality is that there are other types of creators who people get information from, and if we can be a part of making that process more in line with the fundamental principles of journalism, if Stylebot can be part of that, that is a huge win for me.”
The team acknowledges the changing media landscape, while making information that’s important to the Fourth Estate of democracy, easily accessible and implementable, Davis says.
“There’s research showing that the words journalists use have real world impact in a variety of ways. Everything from making people trust the news organization more, to just a moral issue of treating people fairly, to when it comes to things like suicide and mass shootings, the way media cover it can literally save lives,” Davis says.