Empowering Journalists with YESEO

It’s been almost one year since the YESEO app launched as my Reynolds Journalism Institute fellowship project and I have learned a lot.

I first learned to code building a Slack bot, it was where I could empower create something that could help someone do their job better. I wanted to create the YESEO app to use those skills to serve newsrooms I may never meet. I’m excited to say that over 400 workspaces have installed this tool across the world since launch.

YESEO has helped local outlets in Canada, a newsroom in North Central Ohio and even the Knight Center for the Americas at the University of Texas that publishes in English, Spanish and Portuguese since it can support over 11 different language models. Newsrooms have created Slack workspaces just to use YESEO.

YESEO’s name came from felow RJI fellow Tara Pixley and the five stars come from the other RJI fellows who voted for this name in an exercise when we all met in August 2022.

YESEO exists to make people’s lives easier, it saves journalists time and ensures their stories reach a broader audience. It should be as easy as copy and paste to get analysis and ideas you can work with, putting you in the driver’s seat to make the best decisions for your story.

WNIJ in Illinois was one of the first stories I heard about how YESEO can be helpful. I was presenting to the Illinois News Broadcasters Association virtually and learned that when they put a story into YESEO, it helped them generate the highest Google Search traffic and page views for a locally produced story to their station in more than a year.

One of the weaknesses of the product is that it is free: I need to learn who is using it and build relationships with them. You never need to talk to me to use and get value out of YESEO, but I want to learn the story of its users.

So I have made it a point this year to work on building those relationships with users. I held the first open virtual training of YESEO through RJI which drew over 100 signups.

I am also working on having more in-person training this coming year, where I can interact with users and see them get the most out of YESEO.

Any Slack workspace can install YESEO in the Slack App Directory. Best of all, since it works exclusively in Slack it is not custom to any content management system. Where there is a job to be done in your workflow, YESEO wants to help you reduce the time it takes to get there.

Thanks to Jeremy Caplan, Ambreen Ali and the Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program, I have been given the toolset to continue to expand what YESEO can do for users.

In our first class Jeff Jarvis said to “start with whom you’re serving and what their needs are” and that starts with “listening well and not taking your presumptions to them.”

This year has been constant learning from who I am serving. First to create the product as an RJI fellow, but I have learned even more over the past year of it existing to users.

I’ve learned through the past year is that more newsrooms are looking for advice before they publish. Over two-thirds of all stories YESEO breaks down use the /prep command, which supports text for a story yet to be published, as oppose to the /analyze command which takes in existing URLs.

I’ve learned that users want simple workflows, where it can be as easy as hitting a button to get ideas that will help shape their stories.

I have heard from users other opportunities of how YESEO could prove to be helpful: making information that their newsroom has more useful.

I am working on a test right now where YESEO could bring easy to digest information on what drove people to their story: what searches drove traffic, which didn’t and context they otherwise would need help to figure it out.

In testing with two newsrooms I have been able to extend that idea further, what if YESEO could bring entire reports for a day of the year or entire months on data that they otherwise found not useful. If anyone ever asked you for a “deep dive” on their stories from a month, what if you could get that data in 30 seconds?

An example with test data.

This is just one of many different experiments I have been working on to prove YESEO’s value to newsrooms in the future. If you would like to learn more, I invite you to sign up and inquire on what might fit your newsroom best.

I am looking to grow this tool and the winning experiments will become premium services that can help sustain the business for a long time.

YESEO has been supported to be built, my challenge has been to sustain it, which I can do with your help.