I'm a writer. I love journalism and the journalistic instinct. But it's broken. Right now journalism is 80% aggregation and 20% newsgathering. It's a broken model. When 80% of your job is essentially rewriting press releases and 20% of your job is talking to hostile interview subjects, which are you going to focus on? And if that 80% of content brings in 99% of the traffic, what will your publisher ask you to do? Aggregate. But if you’re aggregating you’re not writing. So when I heard about ChatGPT, I thought about how we could use AI to replace grunt journalists whose only job is to change a press release headling to garner more clicks. In fact, if we replace those grunts, we can instead train and hire actual journalists, journalists who have the leisure to work on a story for a week, not five stories a day. Journalists who have the technical skill and training to maneuver the modern world. I started this experiment on Natural Goods News, a news site about psychedelics. I essentially took press releases and news stories and had AI aggregate them for me. This let me post two or three things a day on the site, increasing pageviews from zero to a few hundred a day. So that worked. But that process was too slow. Over time I built BlackBox. This is a tool that takes in news stories and produces aggregated blog posts. When I was running Gizmodo in the early 2000s, I had to write 28 posts a day. This app essentially replaces me completely, allowing one editor to rewrite a dozen stories in a few minutes. There’s a full how-to here. Hopefully, somebody, somewhere, wants to use it.

BlackBox

Instant news and content aggregation with AI.

Instant news and content aggregation with AI.