News or Nah?! is a quick, fun game on India Currents, a news site covering America’s Indian diaspora. It asks players to guess whether a headline is real or false.
Singh, India Currents’s audience engagement editor, made it purely out of curiosity.
She involved generative AI right from the beginning. “My first step was to ask ChatGPT how to even develop something like this. It said that it would need the RSS feed to go through the latest stories from India Currents.”
Before building the game, she wanted to get an idea of its look and feel. So she used OpenAI’s ChatGPT again to make the mock-up. She eventually used the mock-up, saved as a PNG file, in her prompt to make the game using HTML.
She used an OpenAI subscription she was given as a participant in the AI Community Engagement Lab at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Normally, the monthly subscription costs $20.
Her CUNY coach, Joe Amditis, advised her to keep a note of every change she makes in a ‘change log’. If AI failed at any point, Singh could use the change log to go back to when it worked properly.
She has since made many new features on the India Currents website. She starts with a wireframe and then, once everyone is happy, uses generative AI to create code. She now often uses Google’s Stitch to help design web pages. Then she uses a variety of mainstream generative AI tools to create HTML code that works within India Currents’ CMS, WordPress.
Recently, she has created a landing page for India Currents’ live YouTube show and another for their newsletter using this process.
When Singh was developing a landing page for a solutions journalism project, she found another benefit of this workflow: it is easy to consult with editors on the wireframe.
Singh encourages others to generate code to update the features on their website. She started her career as a software engineer before switching to journalism, as she always saw herself as a storyteller. But she said she hasn’t coded for more than seven years, so these generative AI capabilities have genuinely opened up possibilities to her. One key bit of advice for others who want to vibe code to update a WordPress news site is to ask the AI tool first if it can generate HTML code for use in the WordPress HTML block.
This article was first published on Medium, Generative AI in the Newsroom.
This is part of a series on homemade newsroom tools. Previously, we reported on journalism students who used Claude to make a tool to put text on pictures for Instagram for a small newsroom, and how the editor of one tiny newsroom vibe coded a public meeting monitoring tool. We want to hear which tools you have built. Share by leaving a comment on Medium or emailing clare.spencer@northwestern.edu.
