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Articles by Ricardo Bilton

Ricardo Bilton is a contributor at the Nieman Journalism Lab. He was previously a reporter at Digiday, where he covered the business of digital media. He’s also written for VentureBeat, ZDNet, The New York Observer and The Japan Times. When he’s not working, he’s probably at the movies.
@rbilton
With Lynx Insights, Reuters wants to marry the data-crunching skills of machines with the editorial judgment of human reporters.
A driving principle for the incubator is to make it so “ideas can bubble up from the bottom, or the middle, or the top” of the organization.
“If you go to any news site, at least half the headlines require a huge amount of assumed knowledge. Thats fine if you’re a journalist who spends a lot of time reading the news but it’s not if you are an average person who checks the news once a day for five minutes. We’re building for that second group.”
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“For us, this is a way to let people read and ask questions at their own pace, instead of having them read through long screens of text. Often people aren’t engaged in stories because they haven’t had the right context.”
“Publications like the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal assume a lot of things about what their readers know. If the price of oil goes up, what happens to the dollar? They assume you know that. We assume our readers don’t.”