A reporter in Cleveland just built an interactive map. No coder. No ticket to IT. Just her, an AI assistant, and an idea she wanted to see on the page.
That's happening right now at Advance Local, the company behind NJ.com, Cleveland.com, OregonLive, MassLive, and MLive. And it's got me thinking about how fast the line between "writer" and "builder" is disappearing.
Here's the story. David Cohn, VP of AI Innovation at Advance Local, talked about this on a webinar hosted by the International News Media Association's Newsroom Innovation Initiative. His company's goal for 2026 is simple to state and hard to pull off: let reporters and editors build their own interactive charts, maps, and story tools, without waiting on a programmer.
Why does that matter? Because good journalism used to hit a wall right at the moment it got interesting. A reporter has a great idea for a live election map or an interactive timeline, and then she needs a developer, a project queue, and three weeks she doesn't have. By the time the tool ships, the story's cold.
So Advance Local built something called StudioMaker. Think of it like a spreadsheet for building news apps. Reporters upload, edit, preview, and publish their own projects, no GitHub required, no version-control headaches. Cohn says the whole point was to make it feel as familiar as Excel, so even the least tech-savvy person on staff could use it.
And people are using it. Cleveland.com built an interactive feature on every woman who's served as governor of Ohio, timed to election coverage. A team of reporters rigged up a live blogging tool where they just type updates into a spreadsheet and the content publishes itself to the site in real time, perfect for election nights, breaking news, or the Super Bowl. Other teams built election trackers, data maps, and, my favorite example, a guide to the best dumpling restaurants in Pittsburgh. That's journalism meeting real life, the kind of local, specific, useful thing that makes a reader actually care.
Now, here's the part that caught my attention as someone who's spent years figuring out unfamiliar tools on the road with no IT department to call. Giving more people the power to build things also means more chances for mistakes. AI-generated code can have security holes nobody notices until it's too late.
Advance Local's answer is to have the AI check its own work. Every project gets scanned automatically after it's uploaded. The system looks for security risks and checks it against technical standards. Some problems get fixed on the spot. Others get flagged for a human expert to look at. And some projects just get rejected outright. Everything lives on Advance Local's own servers, so the company can step in and pull something down if it needs to.
That's smart. Innovation without guardrails isn't innovation, it's just recklessness with better marketing.
As more reporters started building things, Advance Local noticed a pattern: a lot of projects needed the same basic pieces. So instead of reinventing a chart or a map every single time, they built reusable modules reporters can customize for their own stories. Less reinventing the wheel, more time actually reporting.
One example Cohn mentioned: a sports reporter in New Jersey is tracking undefeated high school teams across the region, something that used to take serious time and manpower to pull together manually. Now it's just another tool in the kit.
The company's leaning on Claude as its main AI model for writing and reviewing code, while testing ChatGPT and Gemini on the side. They're also building a network of AI-curious staffers in each market who can mentor the rest of the newsroom and nudge people to just try things.
Cohn made a point worth remembering: the goal isn't turning every journalist into a software engineer. It's giving them enough tools and confidence to ask "what if I could show this differently?" and then actually do it. The AI checks the code. The humans still decide what the story is.
I like that balance. Technology should open doors, not hand over the keys to the whole house. Whether you're building a news app or just learning to edit your own travel videos on the road, the lesson's the same: the tools get easier, but the curiosity still has to come from you.
What tool have you been putting off learning because you figured it was "too technical" for you? Maybe it isn't anymore.
Source: Vietnam.vn
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