NYT builds Blossom, an internal social media suggestion bot for Slack; typical post gets 380% more clicks
The New York Times built a Slack bot to help decide which stories to post to social media — The New York Times publishes more than 300 stories each day.
Context & Ripple Effects
In August 2015 The New York Times was pushing out more than 300 stories a day with no systematic way to decide what earned social distribution, so it built Blossom, an internal Slack bot that recommends which stories to post — and posts it suggests typically draw about 380% more clicks. It is an early instance of a publisher treating the chat tool itself as the interface where editorial decisions get made.
The move sits inside a broader arc: months later Slack shipped Botkit, an open-source framework that made building such bots far easier, Storyful began testing client-facing Slack integrations for news alerts, and years after that BuzzFeed turned the same idea outward with a consumer recipe chatbot tied to subscription sales.
First-order effects
- NYT's social media team now has an algorithmic gatekeeper over which of its 300+ daily stories reach Facebook and Twitter, with suggested posts earning roughly 380% more clicks than typical ones.
Second-order effects
- Other media companies read the result as a template: Storyful moved within months to test Slack integrations that push news alerts directly to clients' channels, and Slack responded by opening a bot-building framework (Botkit) to court exactly this newsroom use case.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, newsroom decision-support bots evolve from internal helpers into consumer-facing products — BuzzFeed's Tasty recipe chatbot, built explicitly to sell subscriptions, is the endpoint of the path Blossom started — while Slack's own role in newsrooms grows more double-edged as the same channels used for workflow become venues for journalists to organize against management.
The trend: Newsrooms are turning collaboration platforms like Slack into the work surface where algorithmic suggestions increasingly shape both editorial decisions and, eventually, direct-to-reader products.