When another publisher or reporter asks me how to get started with AI, this is the page I point them to. It’s short on purpose — these are the things I actually use or recommend, not a directory.
If you only do one thing from this page, do this one: write a context document for your organization. It is the single change that has done the most for my own work, and I wrote up how and why.
Learning the tools
Anthropic Academy — free courses with certificates, including tracks written for small businesses and nonprofits rather than developers. This is where I send people first.
Claude Cowork — Claude working directly on your files, where you approve each step. No terminal, no code. The right on-ramp if you want AI doing real work before you want to learn anything technical.
Context Engineering Clearly Explained (Tina Huang) — twenty minutes on why what you give the model matters more than how you phrase the ask. The technical version of the point I keep making. Her channel is worth the subscribe.
AI for local news
Joe Amditis — practical AI guides written at one-person-newsroom scale, on his own site and at the Center for Cooperative Media. The closest thing to a manual for shops like mine.
LION Publishers — the independent local news association. Peer cohorts, sustainability programs, and AI training that assumes your whole staff might be one person.
Local Media Association — AI resources — case studies from publishers actually running this stuff, not vendors selling it.
OpenNews Source and SRCCON — the community where newsroom technology gets figured out in the open.
AI and the Future of News (Reuters Institute) — where the research on what audiences actually think about AI in news lives. Useful when someone asserts what readers want.
Worth your inbox
One Useful Thing (Ethan Mollick) — the most consistently practical writing on working with AI, from a Wharton professor who actually tests things.
Newsroom Robots (Nikita Roy) — the podcast on AI in the news industry.
AI as Normal Technology (Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor) — the Princeton researchers behind AI Snake Oil, treating AI as significant but ordinary technology rather than as a coming superintelligence. Neither boosterish nor doom-y, which is rarer than it should be.
How I AI — practitioners walking through the workflows they actually run, step by step.
My own tools and writing
The software I’ve built for newsrooms and note-takers lives on the Digital Tools page. Longer-form thoughts are under Writing.
Occasional notes when I ship a tool or write something — no schedule, no weekly anything.