Messaging is the New Browser: Telling stories and building audience one sentence at a
time (Or The Session Formerly Known as Messaging is the Medium)

Yvonne Leow, Knight Fellow, @YvonneLeow
Michael Morisy, MuckRock, @morisy

What do voice-recognition assistants, Slack bots and the latest crop of mobile payment apps have in common? They all use natural language messaging as the interface — an area journalists have largely ignored over the past decade. It’s time for a closer look. In this session, we’ll explore the rich, hidden history of using messaging as the medium for fun, quirky, and occasionally powerful applications, ranging from SmarterChild and Siri to SnapCash and Wolfram Alpha. What can newsrooms learn about interacting with their audience in this intimate format? Can we design a more personal way to tell stories through messaging or develop new messaging products to serve our audience?

Discussion about JoJo the Bot, @JoJoTheBot

1. Setting Goals 
- Sign-up people 
- Gather user information 
- Demonstrate virtual and IRL engagement
- Crowdsourcing content

2. Drafting a Narrative 

Script: http://jojothebot.tumblr.com/

3. Results

(see powerpoint)
 
4. Creating Content for the Medium 

Questions to Answer: 
1. What kind of information do you want to broadcast? 
2. What kind of user information do you want?
3. What kind of polling can you do? 
4. What kind of crowdsourcing can you do? 

Group 1. SCOTUS decision on same-sex marriage http://nyti.ms/1HkTUAJ
Group 2. California drought http://lat.ms/1LtV7rn
Group 3. 2016 Presidential Election 
Group 4. NBA Finals 
Group 5. 4th of July Celebration 

5. Messaging Ideas and Takeaways 

Group 1: 

- Sign up people planning to get married if the Supreme Court rules that gay marriage is legal.
- Tell people in what areas do people want to get married that the law does not allow.
- Send the decision when it's announced.
- Crowdsource photos of people who are getting married on decision day.
- Find out who's officiating weddings. 
- Find out who's *not* officiating weddings.
- Crowdsource stories from people struggling to get married.
 - Which churches are allowing weddings?
- Find out which of the users are red or blue (politically)
- Send out official statements from a person's chosen political leaders.


Group 2:
- poll: how much has your water bill gone up?
- poll: how are you affected by the drought (anecdotal stories)?
-- are you doing anything differently?
- poll: any madmax-esque survival skills to share (a life hack poll)?
- crowdsource greenspaces photos? (are people with money paying for green or tearing out their lawns)
- poll: group shower willingness poll?
- alerts: you've exceeded that level of rain...no watering your lawn; government insentive announcements, "it's o.k. to buy front loading washers..."
- tool: water use lookup by neighboorhood (send your address get feedback on how your hood is doing) #droughtshaming
- Ask anything about the drought? (no dumb questions)
- Your water usage is equal to - Lake Shasta / Lake Tahoe / Lake Castaic (or how many swimming pools)

How can we personalize and give people agency over a giant issue?

Game: Can you cut your water use by 20 percent?

Group 3: 

Respond to users' exit pool answers with actionable information (GOTV, etc.) based on other data that have been received so far

Use entry polling to deliver voter guide information for issues/seats on which the user is undecided


Group 4: 


Group 5:
NBA Finals
What would you do using messaging / NLP to engage your audience either before, during, or after the NBA Finals (circa 2015)

Who is the audience? What level of expertise are you assuming and/or how are you going to assess and then respond to those different levels?

What is the opening gambit? What it the first thing that someone sees when they've "opted in">

Can there be a quasi-interactive element in which you help someone understand where they might be in a given conversation, experience, leaderboard? 




Additional Resources (add your own!)

Futures of Text, Jonathan Libov, http://whoo.ps/2015/02/23/futures-of-text
Messaging is the Medium, a16z, https://soundcloud.com/a16z/a16z-podcast-messaging-is-the-medium
The State of Messaging, Benedict Evans, http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/3/24/the-state-of-messaging
The Future of Messenger, Techcrunch, http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/06/the-future-of-messenger/