Newsroom Robots

Jaemark Tordecilla: Unlocking the Potential of Custom GPTs for Newsrooms

Newsroom Robots

Show Notes

Jaemark Tordecilla, Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, joins host Nikita Roy to discuss the potential of using custom GPTs for journalistic purposes. Jaemark is the former editor-in-chief and senior assistant vice president of News and Public Affairs at GMA News, the Philippines' leading digital news organization.

For the past year as a Nieman Fellow, Jaemark has been pushing the boundaries of what's possible with custom GPTs – personalized versions of ChatGPT that can be tailored with specific instructions, knowledge, and capabilities to serve a particular purpose or task.

In this episode, Jaemark shares his experiences creating custom GPTs like the COA Beta Assistant to summarize dense government audit reports. He dives into how custom GPTs can streamline processes across the journalism value chain - from data analysis and visualization to content creation and fact-checking.

The episode explores the ease of building these AI tools without coding, integrating custom knowledge bases, and leveraging advanced capabilities like image recognition.

Nikita and Jaemark also discuss real-world use cases, the power of democratizing access to AI for smaller newsrooms, and navigating the limitations of these models.

Sign up for the Newsroom Robots newsletter for episode summaries and insights from host Nikita Roy.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

More from Newsroom Robots

May 30, 2026

For most of journalism’s history, the article has been the atomic unit of news: a fixed container, written once and served the same way to everyone. That’s beginning to change. AI is moving out from behind the scenes, where it quietly powered efficiencies, and into the interface itself, where it can assemble, personalize, and adapt the news to each reader.

Apr 12, 2026

At The Seattle Times, an AI tool identified a new prospect and helped close additional ad revenue in a single day. The Seattle Times is one of 11 news organizations participating in the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program, funded by OpenAI and Microsoft. Through this initiative, AI engineering fellow Rajesh Barade worked with the advertising team to address their challenges and developed a prospecting agent. This tool enables sales representatives to enter a category or focus area, identify businesses spending in that market, find decision-makers, access advertising spend data, and generate personalized outreach.

Mar 13, 2026

For years, the aggregator model was simple: curate the best journalism from thousands of publishers and send audiences their way. Now that contract is being rewritten, and Yahoo News is one of the most interesting places to watch it happen.

Mar 2, 2026

AI is settling in as infrastructure within newsrooms, a layer quietly reshaping how journalists discover information, how stories move through production, and how audiences increasingly expect news to reach them.

Mar 2, 2026

Most major newsrooms have now moved beyond early experimentation with AI. The main challenge now is determining how to govern effectively, scale consistently, and strategically position AI across the entire organization—while maintaining public trust as a central priority.

See all episodes →