Syracuse Stylebot case study

How Stylebot became the go-to resource for student editors at Syracuse’s Newhouse School

The Newhouse School, which has one of the top journalism programs in the United States, improved the quality of the copy on its award-winning student-produced digital publication by integrating Stylebot into its editing class.

A required editing course has always been an important part of the curriculum for magazine, news and digital journalism students at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications.

“We want to create strong communicators in the end,” Jon Glass, a professor of practice and the school’s executive editor, said. “Editing as a skill is something that will benefit them, whether it’s their own self-editing or putting them in a position to lead media outlets. We see it as a necessary skill to graduate from a school of the caliber of Newhouse.”

Students in the school’s editing classes review copy for TheNewsHouse.com, an award-winning student-produced digital publication. Glass, who has been at Syracuse for 17 years, serves as an adviser for The NewsHouse in addition to teaching classes on digital innovation and digital news leadership.

The students in the editing class communicate with The NewsHouse’s leaders on Slack. But they were using physical stylebooks and apps as their primary editing resource, and Glass and his colleagues were looking for new solutions.

So when he and his colleagues learned about Stylebot, a modern style guide that helps journalists save time without sacrificing quality by answering writing and editing questions on Slack, Microsoft Teams and Google Chrome, they saw an opportunity to improve students’ workflow and their engagement with editing resources.

“Stylebot fit very nicely into the workflow that we created that combined students in the editing class with the students on The NewsHouse lead editorial team,” Glass said. “It was moving away from a book and providing a resource that was literally at their fingertips.”

A “seamless” customized integration

Once The NewsHouse had Stylebot on its Slack workspace, Syracuse faculty created a Stylebot channel and introduced the product to students during class. Glass called the integration process “seamless” and said having a Stylebot channel was “pivotal, because once we were able to get in front of classes and train them on how NewsHouse works, Stylebot became a key part of that discussion.”

The NewsHouse has its own style guide that covers key local terms and other university- or Syracuse-specific information, and Glass decided to take advantage of Stylebot’s customization option to get that guide combined with the USC Annenberg Style Guide that powers Stylebot. This puts all of The NewsHouse’s editing resources in one place, and students and faculty alike can count on Stylebot’s answers being exclusively from the Annenberg’s or The NewsHouse’s style guide.

Students at Syracuse can ask Stylebot everything from, “Do we use Syracuse University on first reference?” to, “When do we use person-first language?”

Stylebot also has answers to small questions, such as whether “record-breaking” has a hyphen, and it can help students review English grammar lessons, such as collective nouns or subjects and objects in sentences.

There are no AI-generated answers in Stylebot, so journalists never have questions about consistency or accuracy when getting answers to their questions.

Glass said that customizing Stylebot made the product “even more valuable than the standard AP style, because it provided the overall direction of a good style guide but also had the localized words and style that would be found in our style guide.”

Syracuse customized Stylebot with its local style guide, but that’s just one example of how to make Stylebot your own. For example, CalMatters added its database of state legislators to Stylebot, and some organizations use it for other types of documentation. (See our FAQ for more details.)

Syracuse faculty started by prompting students to use Stylebot in class, then encouraged them to make it a habit.

“As questions surfaced during the editing process, we steered them toward Stylebot and found students gravitating toward it,” Glass said.

More attention to editing and “sharper” coverage

When there was a question of which terms to use, “we asked Stylebot and leaned into that in any of our coverage,” Glass said.

When the Israel-Hamas war broke out in the fall, for example, Glass said he and his students turned to Stylebot for guidance on key terms. Stylebot made those terms easy to access by linking the main style guide entry about the war to other related terms that journalists can easily access.

Glass likes these related entries, not only because they prompt students to further explore the style guide but also because they help guide his students in navigating style issues.

“I also like that it does have the supplemental suggestions within any response,” he said, “so if it didn’t hit it on the mark you have other options there to think about.”

Stylebot’s dual benefits of convenience and thoughtfulness has brought editing front and center for more students.

“I can tell that from some of the conversations that have come up that students are thinking a bit more about editing,” he said.

And of course, this attention to editing has translated into better stories.

“Stylebot has elevated their abilities,” Glass said, “and as an end result made our content even sharper.”

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