Honolulu Civil Beat Wants to Use its Bot to Deepen Ties with Readers (And Find Some New Stories, Too)

Bots on Facebook Messenger have been, at best, a mixed bag so far. When Facebook opened up Messenger to brands last April, the immediate — and unsurprising — reaction among publishers was to see the chat app as yet another distribution channel. The early “bot” experiments from CNN, Mic, and others were built around this conception, offering subscribers daily digests of top stories or other simple forms of push-based alerts.

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