“The Guardian” creates automated slow news experience

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Just saw this on Nieman Lab: “The Guardian experiments with a robot-generated newspaper“. Called The Long Good Read, this new publication is a weekly digest of the “best longform stories of the previous seven days”.

The philosophy behind the product fits perfectly into a “slow” approach of news. Nieman Lab writes:

Jemima Kiss, head of technology for The Guardian, said The Long Good Read is another attempt at finding ways to give stories new life beyond the day they’re published: “It’s just a way of reusing that content in a more imaginative way and not getting too hung up on the fact it’s a newspaper.”

The algorithm put behind the experiment is merely a way of making the selection more efficient. But it may promise more future computer-assisted selection of content that ends up being printed…

The project overall reminds me of The Guardian weekly I subscribed to years ago, which was a digest of the world’s news stories published in the British paper.

Own the weekend



“Own the weekend”. It’s a pretty nice tagline that the British newspaper The Guardian got itself to promote its weekend editions. Discovering it on a friend’s Facebook feed, I first thought they were launching a new product to help you get up to date on their great content during the weekend to better own the rest of your time off. Actually, they are just adding a “Cook” edition to their weekend publication. The video is still pretty cool and funny and features Hugh Grant. The ad was created by BBH, the agency responsible for the award-winning Three Little Pigs ad.