Imagine you’re a journalist and each morning, when you come into work, things just … flow. 

You have a briefing doc for the day ahead. Your inbox is managed, with replies drafted and prioritised by the topics you decide. You can find any contact you have ever spoken to. All your interviews are transcribed, and all your meetings have follow-up notes. You spend your days doing hard and challenging work, but with a felt sense that you are on top of things. 

This is the first step in newsroom AI adoption: imagining a better workday, individually and as a team. 

First, tap into imagination: What if all of this could be so much better?

Imagination is essential because once we have the goal, we can reach it with AI. 

In our virtual newsroom at ImpactAlpha, this loop – imagine, create, imagine better, create better – happens all the time. It is the core of how we build. With team members distributed all around the world, we do a lot of our organising via Google Docs and messaging.

Our CEO, Dennis Price, got to imagining: what if when you logged on at the start of the day, everything you needed was in one place - content calendar, upcoming travel, our podcast and live event planning. What if you could see at a glance what all your colleagues are working on? Oh, and what if it was also absolutely beautiful. 

Even a year ago, this would have been a tall order, requiring multiple teams and rounds of conversation and prioritisation. This time it wasn’t. Dennis just built the thing in a weekend. 

And that’s the lesson here – the capabilities of Claude and ChatGPT – to write, to design and to code have developed impossibly quickly even over the last few months. 

So if you can imagine it, you can probably build it. 

Finally, a note on cynicism. As journalists, part of our job is to discern hype from reality. It’s a valuable service we offer our audiences. But if we let cynicism become our starting position, our default assumption and our identity, we miss the potential. We literally stop perceiving what is possible. 

That’s where imagination comes in.