Roo Hutton

Former News Labs Senior Software Engineer
Graphic squiggles

Biography

Roo is a former senior developer in BBC News Labs. He's particularly interested in design and frontend development of audience-facing experiments and tools to help journalists. His background is in privacy research, previously working as a Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews and The Open University.

Projects and blog posts

07 October 2020

Graphical storytelling: Extracting and painting a fresh perspective

BBC News trials a new story format on social media.
22 March 2019

Stories by numbers: Experimenting with semi-automated journalism

BBC News Labs' Roo Hutton explains how the BBC is experimenting with semi-automated journalism to bring you even more relevant local stories.
project

Contributors

Identifying the most-used contributors to news stories.
project

Crossing Divides

An interactive news game to give BBC audiences new skills for navigating polarised conversations.
project

CuPid

Editorial control of news curation for personalisation
project

Depth Finder

Making the BBC's analysis, explainers and interactive features more discoverable
project

Evergreen Content

An experiment in identifying existing BBC content that relates to current Google Trends data.
project

The Explainer Builder

An experiment in using a single source of truth for journalists creating explainers.
project

Graphical Storytelling

Reaching new audiences with short comics about important health stories
project

Live Page Translation

Aggregating multilingual live page content through automatic translations.
project

Online Content Toolkit (OCTO)

The Online Content Toolkit, or Octo, is a project exploring media editing, repurposing and augmentation based on the results of intelligent analysis.
project

Salco - Semi-Automated Local Content

Semi-automated local stories about election results, NHS performance and more
project

Frank - Building a lingua franca through machine translation

Translating BBC articles from 40+ languages into English for better visibility and discovery.

Meet the Team

Alicia Grandjean

Senior Software Engineer

Ben Nuttall

Senior Software Engineer

Clare Spencer

Senior Research and Development Producer

Dave Bevan

Senior Systems Engineer

Jack McPoland

Software Engineer

Julie McManus

Senior Software Engineer

Lee Fuller

Software Engineering Manager

Manjiri Carey

News Editor

Marie Rasmussen

UX Designer

Miranda Marcus

Executive Product Manager

Philip Hatcher-Moore

Journalist

Sarah Rainbow

Senior Software Engineer

Sevi Sariisik Tokalac

Senior Research and Development Producer

Tom Francis-Winnington

Senior Software Engineer

Elsewhere on News Labs

news

A translation quality assessment by journalists for journalists

news

News for All: Delivering value in journalism

news

Salco 2023: Making news hyperlocal

Careers

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