Knight Center Finds Solution in YESEO for Multi-Language Support
It can be hard for the Knight Center to find tools that meet all their needs.
After all, their organization publishes in English, Spanish and the language that its Brazilian founder Rosental Alves says is the “most beautiful language in the world”: Portuguese. So when they found the free YESEO app and added it to their Slack workspace in August, it was a much needed boost.
“Finding one that's really good and that works in those three languages is not super easy,” Teresa Mioli, administrative program coordinator at the Knight Center, said. “Least of all, finding one that's affordable or free. That's what's awesome about it.”
The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin is a leader in training, where they have run journalism courses that have trained over 300,000 people. They also run the International Symposium on Online Journalism (ISOJ), which enters its 25th year in 2024. On top of that, they publish a trilingual digital magazine, the LatAm Journalism Review, which publishes in English, Spanish and Portuguese to help journalists in the Americas.
Finding something that can work easily in their Slack workspace can help the entire team as they work to produce stories and serve such a diverse audience from Latin America, Western Europe and the United States. YESEO is as easy as “Add to Slack,” giving access to the entire team right away.
“It’s not like I have to go to another platform and create another username and another password for some other platform,” Mioli said. “I don't need another thing to keep track of. I really like that it works in Slack and then it’s easier to integrate into your editing process because of that.”
On a daily basis, the Knight Center is producing stories about their impact in courses that can serve anywhere from 300 to 5,000 people, covering press freedom in Latin America, or preparing for a large conference.
When Mioli needed to create a headline for a story on a new training program for journalists in the Peruvian Amazon, she was able to use YESEO’s /analyze command on the story and then retrieve headline suggestions.
“It gives me a starting point, which is super helpful, especially when we have limited time and resources,” Mioli said. “I didn't have anything that could help me with SEO before then.”
“What I found is that it helps to have that second set of eyes for you to kind of look at what you’ve put together. Look at your story and synthesize it: this is what I think it's about and I need to adapt my story because that's not actually what it's about, to have that kind of second set of eyes, like an outside perspective.”
YESEO app founder Ryan Restivo is included in the over 300,000 people who have taken courses through the Knight Center and found it useful in making the free Slack app.
“The fact that Ryan created YESEO using lessons learned from one of the Knight Center's courses on data journalism makes using the tool even cooler,” Mioli said.