The Challenge: CNN’s Social Lab ask was for us to explore how to build trust in the news.

Our Goal: Design a solution that helps journalists and editors produce more credible, transparent, and bias-aware content.

Initial Focus:

Chose law enforcement as a stakeholder and conducted 4 weeks of interviews to understand their relationship with news.

Key Insight:

While law enforcement had valuable perspectives, the greater opportunity for impact lay with journalists & editors, those directly shaping stories.

The Initial Pivot

A bias detection tool that can give journalists real-time feedback on language and framing; helping newsrooms like CNN create more balanced stories, build transparency, and regain trust from their audiences.

Pivot:

Shifted toward an independent plugin, flexible enough to integrate into text editors and meet journalists where they work.

Final Solution:

Incorporated user feedback to refine clarity, reduce friction, and make feedback more actionable.

Articulate Plugin:

• It scans your draft to find statements that might be inaccurate or misleading and checks claims against credible, up-to-date sources to flag anything that doesn’t match.

• Designed as a lightweight, independent plugin compatible with text editors.

Factual

• Scans drafts for inaccurate or misleading claims.

• Checks statements against credible, up-to-date sources.

• Flags anything that doesn’t align.

Style & Tone

• Compares writing to newsroom guidelines.

• Uses a library of approved words, phrases, and tone.

• Flags language that doesn’t fit and suggests alternatives.

Context

• Surfaces related internal and external articles.

• Shows how a story fits into wider coverage.

• Helps maintain editorial consistency across reporting.

Sizzle Reel introducing Articulate to CNN’s design team

Working on Articulate x CNN taught me

Stakeholder pivoting: Learned how to pivot from one stakeholder group to another based on where the solution could have the most impact.
Design Skills Growth: Strengthened skills in user research, iterative prototyping, and user-centered design, applying them to a high-stakes context.
Balancing Integrity & Usability: Demonstrated the ability to balance editorial integrity with usability, ensuring that credibility tools do not disrupt newsroom workflows.