CBS Stylebot case study

For CBS News and Stations, Stylebot is “integral” to ensuring consistency across digital platforms

CBS News and Stations’ custom version of Stylebot in its Slack workspace helps bring the standards of CBS News to communities across the country.

Like many journalists, Alison Linton has a lot of bases to cover in her day-to-day work.

As the executive producer of streaming for CBS News Sacramento, Linton oversees a team that produces stories for CBS News’ website, streaming platforms and the CBS Sacramento social media channels. CBS News Sacramento is one of 14 CBS News and Stations’ owned-and-operated local outlets, which provide news and information across platforms, including CBSNews.com, the CBS Television Network, CBS News Radio and podcasts, and CBS News 24/7, a new streaming news service.

Linton calls her job “fun and fulfilling,” and her commitment to CBS News Sacramento’s audience is apparent. One of her goals is to make every story “reader-worthy” — that is, worth the audience’s time and energy.

“A lot of that comes down to trust,” she said. “The more we can strive to make sure our content is accurate, trustworthy and factual, the more we can serve our community.”

Accurate, trustworthy content is vital to CBS News’ reputation. The organization pioneered some of the modern standards of journalism and has honed its style, standards and practices over its nearly 100-year history. As journalism standards have evolved, so has the media landscape. And keeping pace with it all is no small feat.

That’s part of the reason CBS News and Stations turned to Stylebot.

A customized solution

Linton and her colleagues at CBS News and Stations’ owned-and-operated stations, which serve communities across the United States, are not only responsible for overseeing reporting and production in their local markets but also for enforcing CBS News’ high standards.

“It’s important that our journalism and our style across all of our stations and our national site are consistent,” Fred Harner, vice president of streaming and digital for CBS News and Stations, said.

Consistency means everything from writing “child care” (not “childcare”) the same way across all 14 local sites to ensuring that journalists uphold CBS News’ standards for accurate word choice on topics ranging from homelessness to race and ethnicity.

That means journalists at stations from Boston to Minneapolis to Los Angeles often need to reference the CBS News and Stations style guide and other key editorial documents that govern breaking news process and specifics for reporting on an earthquake, for example. Since they were already using Slack in their day-to-day workflow, it made sense for CBS News and Stations to give these journalists the ability to access precise information in these documents in Slack with a one-word input or a question such as, “How do we write about homelessness?”

So CBS News and Stations opted to customize Stylebot, a service that integrates an organization’s in-house style guide and other documents with the USC Annenberg Style Guide that powers Stylebot. (See our FAQ for more details about how you can make Stylebot your own.)

Now, when producers at each station are going about their daily workflow on Slack, they can ask Stylebot a question in direct messages or channels and get an instant answer directly from CBS News’ documentation. And there are no AI-generated answers in Stylebot, so journalists know they’re getting accurate, reliable information.

A daily habit

Shortly after CBS News and Stations subscribed to Stylebot, leaders across the stations introduced it to staff and added it to key Slack channels.

The teams took to it quickly.

“Anytime we have a style question, Stylebot is our first line of defense,” Linton said. “We’re always in Slack, so having [Stylebot] there in such an immediate place is immeasurably beneficial.”

Harner called Stylebot’s ease of use in both direct messages and channels on Slack “really key” and said the teams “recognized quickly the value of Stylebot and how it’s a useful tool they engage with on a daily basis.”

The results of making Stylebot a daily habit are apparent in the improved quality and consistency of journalists’ copy, Harner said. Stylebot also saves time by helping them get their digital stories in line with CBS News’ standards faster.

And that’s important when journalists are publishing everywhere from Instagram to Roku to meet digital audiences where they are with accurate, trustworthy news.

“It’s incredibly fulfilling to work with a team of people who are dedicated to building trust,” Linton said. “Stylebot is integral to making sure we’re consistent across the board.”

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