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It was a case study in the difficulty of covering national political conventions, hurry-up-and-wait affairs that feature a tricky combination of canned speeches and bouts of breaking news at nearby protests. Even in an epicenter of media scrutiny, it's impossible for news organizations to have someone at every street corner.
That's why, when the Republican National Convention kicks off in Cleveland Monday, BuzzFeed will have a reporter in everyone's pocket.
On Sunday, BuzzFeed launched BuzzBot, an automated chatbot for Facebook's Messenger app. The bot, developed by BuzzFeed's Open Lab (an R&D skunkworks based in San Francisco), is capable of having a limited back-and-forth with users to gather news about the convention throughout the week.It works like this:
Users can open up the Facebook Messenger app and search for BuzzFeed News (or follow this link) to open up the dialogue. Then, BuzzBot will begin asking users a series of multiple-choice questions related to the convention:
Are they following the news?
If they live in Cleveland, are they attending, protesting or living there?...
Will a bot avoid plagiarism? Who knows but it's fun to contemplate.