OpenAI has added a new Academy video set for journalists and news organizations, expanding its media-focused training to include practical lessons for using ChatGPT in daily newsroom operations.
The ChatGPT 101 for Journalists collection is part of the OpenAI Academy for News Organizations, a learning community for news media editorial, business, product, and technology teams. The community has 1,409 members and includes training, case studies, and playbooks focused on how to use AI in ways that align with your newsroom’s values and audience.
OpenAI Global Affairs announced the videos on LinkedIn, describing them as “specifically tailored for news organizations and journalists.”
The post said the tutorial is aimed at “reporters, editors, producers, newsroom leaders, and educators who want a practical way to start using AI in their daily work, even if they don’t have a technical background.”
The four video collections include Build Your Own Assignment Editor, Power Prompting, Upskilling with Skills, and Skills vs. Agents. The video was published from July 7th to July 13th, 2026 and was presented by Evan Hirsch.
Training begins with daily newsroom work
This video focuses on the day-to-day operations of newsrooms rather than general awareness about AI. Create your own assignment editor shows how workspace agents can look at approved sources like their calendar, inbox, Slack or Teams channels, documents, and more and turn that information into a quick morning brief.
OpenAI Academy describes this use case as a way to help journalists organize deadlines, meetings, messages, and focus time at the start of the day. Workflows are structured around triage, and AI supports planning rather than taking action on its own.
This video asks users to connect only to approved apps, set limits on what agents use, and define what agents should not do. This training also preserves human editorial judgment in the workflow, especially regarding what should be prioritized and what needs follow-up.
Power prompting applies well-known newsroom disciplines to ChatGPT. This video shows how to use city council agenda items to restructure weak prompts into clearer reporting instructions. This structure includes roles, tasks, context, outputs, limits, and checks, and provides a way for journalists to make their ChatGPT responses more specific and verifiable.
This lesson also explains how journalists can ask ChatGPT to identify uncertainties, missing facts, and possible next reporting steps.
Skills and agents get newsroom guardrails
The collection then moves from one-time prompts to repeatable newsroom workflows.
“Skilling Up with Skills” describes how ChatGPT skills capture repetitive processes and return a consistent type of output every time. OpenAI provides examples such as agenda scans, public records reviews, source follow-up lists, and editor preparation packets.
This video asks users to start with a ChatGPT account, repeatable newsroom tasks, and sample inputs such as agendas, meeting packets, and public documents. It also describes how to incorporate human validation into your workflow.
Skills and agents distinguish between reusable processes and the workflows to which they can be applied. OpenAI Academy describes the skill as a template for how newsrooms should structure their summaries, which sources should be cited, which claims should be reviewed, and what the output should look like. It is described as a workflow that allows agents to use approved tools, gather materials, follow instructions, and apply skills.
This video explains how to design an agent with clear beats, jobs, and limits. We also focus on preserving source links, dates, and human reviews, which are the most relevant controls for newsroom use.
OpenAI builds news organization resources
The OpenAI Academy for News Organizations section also includes media stories and workflow examples from publishers in several markets.
Examples listed include India Today, Mediengruppe Pressedruck, General-Anzeiger, Hearst Newspapers, The Quint, Deccan Herald, VG, DMG Media, and El Comercio.
Use cases include AI-powered audience prediction, press release and police report processing, newsroom deployments, sales tools, reader assistants, instant infographics, journalist co-pilots, and election guide workflows.
This wide-ranging collection puts journalist training in a more applied setting. ChatGPT 101 videos explain basic workflow design, and case studies show how news organizations are experimenting with AI across editorial, audience, commercial, and operational tasks.
The most important editorial aspect of the new training is its focus on limits. Videos repeatedly return to approved inputs, source links, dates, workflow boundaries, and human review. These are areas where newsroom AI can quickly become dangerous if teams treat generative AI as a general productivity shortcut rather than a process that requires editorial control.
OpenAI Global Affairs has outlined lessons for giving journalists more time to do the things only humans can do: “asking better questions, fact-checking, making tough editorial demands, and serving our communities respectfully.”
The ChatGPT 101 for Journalists collection is now live in the OpenAI Academy for News Organizations community.
