Journalist or editor
You are the one working to a deadline with material you cannot fully verify yet.
This is you if you record interviews, chase claims you cannot confirm, and publish in more than one language.
You will recognise this work
You work against a deadline with interviews, public claims, images, and material that is not fully verified yet. AI can shorten the mechanical work, but your source carries the risk when a recording leaks or a false claim is published.
Outcomes you own
- An accurate record of what a source said.
- A claim supported by evidence you can show an editor.
- A story whose translation, quotations, and disclosure meet newsroom standards.
Where AI helps, and where it stops
- AI can assist: create a local transcript, translate public text, organise notes, and list verification questions.
- You decide: whether evidence is sufficient, how a source is protected, and what is ready to publish.
- Never delegate: authenticity verdicts, source credibility, quote approval, or editorial responsibility.
Your priority tasks
- Transcribing testimonies and interviews
- Verifying images, video and claims
- Translation into and out of local languages
Tools matched to this role
Match the tool to the material. Public captions and protected source audio should not pass through the same workflow just because both can be transcribed or translated.
- Controlled route for sensitive materialHas a free versionWorks offlineWorks in Iraq
- Never for sensitive materialHas a free versionWorks in Iraq
- Never for sensitive materialHas a free versionWorks in Iraq
- Never for sensitive materialHas a free versionWorks in Iraq
- Only approved or redacted sensitive materialHas a free versionWe do not know whether it works in Iraq
- Only approved or redacted sensitive materialHas a free versionWe do not know whether it works in Iraq
Your data risks
Keep these decisions in the newsroom
- Do not upload protected source audio, contact details, or unpublished reporting notes to a consumer cloud service.
- Do not publish a quote without listening to that passage in the original recording.
- Do not call media real or fake from a chatbot answer or detector score.
Workshop path
- Use a public or synthetic recording and classify the real newsroom material it represents.
- Run one transcription or verification recipe and mark names, numbers, dates, and negations.
- Agree the point at which a reporter stops and an editor must approve the work.
Leave with
A newsroom AI checklist covering source consent, allowed data, quote playback, verification evidence, translation review, disclosure, and editor sign-off.
Prompts for this role
Transcription
Controlled route
Clean up a transcript without changing what was said
25 minutes · Gives you short sections
Do not paste this into a cloud tool.
Answer in [ANSWER LANGUAGE], even if the material below is in another language. Below is a machine transcript of a recorded interview, and it stays on my own computer, so work only with what is here and keep the whole answer local. Clean it up for reading. You may: - Fix punctuation, capitalisation and the obvious spelling of the names I list below. - Remove filler sounds and repeated false starts. - Keep the speaker labels exactly as they are. You may NOT: - Complete an unfinished sentence. - Replace a word you think was misheard. - Reorder anything. - Remove a repetition that carries meaning. Keep every [inaudible] marker and its timestamp where it is. Give me, in this order: A. The cleaned transcript. B. A list of every change you made that was more than punctuation, with the original wording beside it. C. The lines you could not make sense of, quoted, so a person can listen again. Names and terms spelled correctly: [LIST THE NAMES AND PLACES] Transcript: [PASTE THE TRANSCRIPT]
News monitoring
Public material only
Turn a week of headlines into a digest
15 minutes · Gives you short sections · Works on a phone
Answer in [ANSWER LANGUAGE], even if the material below is in another language. Below is a list of published items from this week: headline, outlet, date, and a link or a short extract for each. Rules: 1. Use only the items below. Add no background from your own knowledge. 2. Group them into themes. Name each theme in plain words. 3. Merge items that report the same event into one line, and list every outlet that reported it. If two outlets contradict each other, keep both versions in that line and write CONTRADICTION. 4. Mark SINGLE SOURCE where only one outlet reports something. 5. Dates may arrive in mixed digits: ١٢٣ alongside 123. Copy each date as it appears in the item. 6. Do not judge whether a claim is true. If an item does not say who or when, write "the item does not say". Give me, in this order: A. The themes, most reported first. Under each theme, one line per item: what is claimed, which outlet, what date. B. Everything marked SINGLE SOURCE or CONTRADICTION, as one list. C. What is missing: which of these stories has no follow-up, and which claims nobody has answered. D. Five lines a colleague could read aloud in a meeting. Items: [PASTE THE ITEMS]
Verification
Public material only
Build a verification checklist for a claim
15 minutes · Gives you a checklist · Works on a phone
Answer in [ANSWER LANGUAGE], even if the material below is in another language. I have a claim I cannot verify yet. Do NOT tell me whether it is true, and do not estimate how likely it is. I need a plan for checking it. Rules: 1. Give no verdict. Do not write "probably", "likely", "appears genuine" or any other judgement of the claim. 2. Do not perform the checks. Do not search. Write the plan only. 3. Name people by type of person or institution, never by name. 4. If a check needs something I did not give you, say what it is instead of assuming it. The claim: [WRITE THE CLAIM IN ONE SENTENCE] What I have: [DESCRIBE WHAT YOU HAVE: a photo, a video, a document, a forwarded message, a screenshot] What I already know: [DATE, PLACE, WHO IS SAYING IT, WHERE IT CAME FROM] Give me, in this order: A. What would have to be true for this claim to hold, as separate testable statements. B. The checks, ordered from cheapest to most expensive, and for each one the result that would support the claim and the result that would refute it. C. What evidence would disprove the claim, and who could confirm or refute it locally, by type of person or institution and never by name. D. What cannot be checked from the material I have, including what you, as a language model, cannot check at all.
Transcription
Public material only
Build an interview guide from your topics
15 minutes · Gives you a checklist · Works on a phone
Answer in [ANSWER LANGUAGE], even if the material below is in another language. I have an interview tomorrow. Build a guide from the topics below. The person I will interview may have lived through hard events, so every question must be open, must not suggest its own answer, and must not ask for a detail we do not need. Rules: 1. Write no question that carries its own answer. The words of the answer you expect must not appear in the question. 2. Ask for no identifying detail beyond what the topic needs. No exact address, no full name of a third person, no employer, no date of birth. 3. Ask about events and sequence, not about feelings the person has not offered. 4. Every question must be answerable with a refusal. Add no question that assumes the person will continue. 5. Invent no organisation name, no project name and no place where the recording will be kept. Leave each of those as a gap marked [FILL IN BY HAND]. 6. Plain words. One idea per question. Give me, in this order: A. An opening script to read aloud: who I am, what the interview is for, where the recording and the notes will be kept, that the person may stop at any moment or skip any question, and how to withdraw consent later. Plain language, under 150 words, no legal terms. B. Eight to twelve questions, grouped under the topics below, each with one follow-up question under it. C. Questions to avoid, six at most, each with its reason in three or four words: suggests the answer, reopens the harm, or asks a detail we do not need. D. A closing script: what happens next, and one sentence checking the person is still comfortable with what they gave. Topics: [LIST YOUR THREE OR FOUR TOPICS]
News monitoring
Public material only
Check whether posts only look coordinated
15 minutes · Gives you short sections · Works on a phone
Answer in [ANSWER LANGUAGE], even if the material below is in another language. Below are public posts that look coordinated to me. Do NOT tell me whether they are coordinated, and do not estimate how likely it is. I need to know what to check. Rules: 1. Never conclude that coordination happened. That conclusion is mine to reach or to drop. 2. Replace every account with Account 1, Account 2 and so on. Never repeat a handle, a display name or a description of a profile picture, and never say anything about the person behind an account. 3. Report only what is in the posts below. Do not add background from your own knowledge. 4. For every pattern, give the innocent explanation as well. Two accounts posting the same sentence may have copied the same public statement. Give me, in this order: A. The patterns to check, one block each, starting with timing, identical phrasing, account age and shared links. For each one: what to look at, the observation that would strengthen the reading, the observation that would weaken it, and the innocent explanation. B. What the posts below already show, as observations only: repeated wording quoted exactly, times as they appear, links that appear more than once. No conclusion. C. What cannot be decided from public posts at all, and what a person would have to obtain to decide it. D. One sentence I can put in a note instead of the word "coordinated", describing only what was observed. The posts: [PASTE THE POSTS, WITH THE TIME AND THE DATE ON EACH]
Verification
Public material only
Sweep a batch of photo captions before publishing
15 minutes · Gives you a table
Answer in [ANSWER LANGUAGE], even if the material below is in another language. Below are photograph captions written by different people. Every caption is numbered. I need to know which ones make a claim we cannot support yet. Rules: 1. A caption that describes what is visible is a description. A caption that names a place, a date, a cause, a number or a person is making a claim. Treat the two differently. 2. Do not decide whether a claim is true. Decide what evidence would be needed. 3. Never invent a detail, a place or a date. Never add a caption I did not paste. 4. Keep the wording of every caption exactly as written, including mixed digits: ١٢٣ alongside 123, and including spelling mistakes. 5. Every caption gets exactly one decision: publish, hold, or rewrite. 6. You cannot see the photographs. Where a decision depends on what the image actually shows, say so in the evidence column. Give me, in this order: A. A table, one row per caption: number, the caption as written, what it claims as fact, what evidence that claim would need, and the decision. B. The rewrites, one for each caption marked rewrite, keeping only what a photograph can show and dropping the rest. C. Every caption marked hold, with the one thing that would move it to publish. D. Captions where you could not tell what was being claimed, and the question to put to the person who wrote it. If you are reading on a phone, replace the table with one block per row: a heading line, then one short labelled line per column. The captions: [PASTE THE CAPTIONS, NUMBERED]
Case studies
An Iraqi MP's face was put on a dancer's body, a fact-check proved it, and the video stayed up
SMEX · Iraq, 2025-2026
3 minutes
Recipes
- Controlled route for sensitive material60 minutes
- Controlled route for sensitive material90 minutes
- Controlled route for sensitive material100 minutes
Last checked: 2026-09-01