Today we are launching the Quartz AI Studio to help journalists at Quartz and other news organizations use machine learning to report their stories.
Over the next year, Quartz plans to use machine-learning methods to publish several stories that would otherwise be impossible.
There are several great examples of stories reported using computer algorithms, but those tend to come from large newsrooms with in-house programmers. With each of our stories we hope to help small and midsize newsrooms get smarter about artificial intelligence by publishing how-to guides, best practices, and open-source computer code. These materials will be crafted so that motivated beginners can learn from, replicate, and build on our work.
We want to collaborate with other news organizations for at least half of our published stories. Are you a journalist with a project that could use help from a skilled machine-learning programmer? Let’s talk! Drop us a note at bots@qz.com.
We also plan to add some artificial intelligence to Quackbot, our free Slack bot for journalists.
The Quartz AI Studio is supported by a new grant from the Knight Foundation and builds on the successful Quartz Bot Studio, which also launched with Knight support. Quartz will hire a developer and a writing fellow with money from the grant.