Victor’s AI Newsroom: How One Journalist Built the Future with NotebookLM
Oct 23, 2025Newsrooms are still burning daylight doing what AI could handle before lunch. While the industry debates ethics panels and pilot projects, one journalist in Africa quietly built the future with a laptop, a vision, and Google's Notebook LM.
Meet Victor, a graduate of The AI Upgrade for Journalists program, a six-week course that turns traditional reporters into AI-literate newsroom architects.
Victor saw what every working journalist knows in their bones: the news cycle's a treadmill, and everyone's running out of breath. Africa's stories: bold, urgent, and globally consequential, were getting buried under the noise.
His goal? Build an AI-powered newsroom assistant that cuts straight to what matters.
The Engineering of a News Brain
Victor trained AI like an editor. His prototype, a daily news scanner, started by teaching NotebookLM how his newsroom thinks. He uploaded their best stories from the past quarter, turning them into a living style manual.
He laid down rules like commandments: name every country, explain why it matters, cut the fluff. Then he built prompts that enforced tone, rhythm, and focus.
What came out was clean and disciplined: just headlines, two-sentence summaries, and a tight "why it matters."
The Shift: Text That Talks
Once the written summaries landed sharp: headline, two-sentence brief, and "why it matters", Victor added sound. He chained the summaries into audio, training the voice model to hit the same editorial beat.
Just tight, informative bursts, the kind you'd actually want to hear on your morning run.
Then came automation. Every day, the system scans for new stories across Africa's top markets, pulling from credible sources like Reuters, BBC, and Bloomberg, summarizes them, converts them to audio, and formats them for newsletters or radio-ready bulletins.
His prototype spoke its first words:
That was his newsroom's new voice, automated, but deeply human in intent. This machine delivered.
The Upgrade: Journalism That Builds Itself
This is The AI Upgrade in motion: journalists wielding AI.
Victor's project is a paradigm shift. He built a living newsroom engine that runs without bureaucracy and bias, but with editorial intent.
His mentors saw it instantly. One instructor said:
Another added:
Laughter, awe, and the quiet recognition that something big had just shifted. Victor's closing line said it all:
The Invitation: Join the Next Wave
The next AI Upgrade for Journalists cohort launches November 5th.
Six weeks. Real projects. No hype. You'll learn to build newsroom systems like Victor's: tools that think, write, and scale with you.
If you're tired of running the treadmill, it's time to build the machine.
Join the movement at TheUpgrade.ai.
The future of journalism is augmented.
Kris Krüg is co-founder of The Upgrade Academy, recovering photographer, and professional instigator of creative chaos. He's spent 20+ years watching technology either amplify or stifle human potential. He's chosen amplification.
Peter Bittner entrepreneur, AI product thinker, new media journalist, and UC Berkeley lecturer, is the methodical yin to Kris's creative yang, turning chaos into deployable systems. Together, they've empowered hundreds of professionals.
