Casey Kolderup | The Verge The Verge is about technology and how it makes us feel. Founded in 2011, we offer our audience everything from breaking news to reviews to award-winning features and investigations, on our site, in video, and in podcasts. 2015-08-21T21:12:07+00:00 https://www.theverge.com/authors/casey-kolderup/rss https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/verge-rss-large_80b47e.png?w=150&h=150&crop=1 Casey Kolderup <![CDATA[We made a Twitter bot to save everyone the trouble of writing and reading TV recaps]]> https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2015/8/21/9189493/best-tv-recaps-twitter-bot 2015-08-21T17:12:07-04:00 2015-08-21T17:12:07-04:00
Hack Week Badge

Welcome to the second annual Verge Hack Week. We’re totally blowing up our site: we’ve given our reporters and editors the entire week to play with new tools and experiment with new storytelling ideas, while members of our amazing product team have gathered in New York to help build all sorts of interesting new things. Learn more.

Those of us on the product team here at Vox Media are always looking to improve the lives of our coworkers. We want to make sure that folks like the writers at The Verge have more time in the day to think about the “The Future” and record podcasts — or whatever it is that they do. So when The Verge’s Hack Week started, I tried to take a step back and identify two things:

  1. What was taking up a lot of my editorial colleagues' time?
  2. What parts of the media world could we consider expanding into?

After some careful consideration, the answers I came up with were:

  1. Writing.
  2. TV EPISODE RECAP BLOGGING.

TV show recaps + Twitter bot = $$$

So I set to work with Verge entertainment reporter Jamieson Cox. My idea? Write up the basic blueprint of an episode of some of the biggest, most popular TV shows from now and the past few years, then train our blazing-fast computer servers to generate random yet eerily plausible headlines that summarize last night’s TV shows. By posting the recap headlines straight to Twitter, we ensure that the content is shareable as heck, and will easily integrate into your daily social media diet, so you’ll always be up to date with the latest shows. (You can also ruin your friends’ days by retweeting the shocking and definitely accurate headlines straight into their timelines!)

This plan is so smart, and the outcome already so successful, that we fully expect that the proverbial check is in the mail (we will be making lots of money from this (I don’t exactly know how yet, though)). If you’re ready to experience the best TV recaps in the industry, head on over to Twitter and follow @best_tv_recaps now.

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