ChatGPT has undoubtedly evolved as a key tool in today’s digital landscape, gaining tremendous traction since the dawn of 2023. Its multi-faced, multi-utility use cases highlight the revolutionary role that AI is set to play in the future. While journalism and news reporting require a great deal of human touch and ethical considerations, the use of AI tools like ChatGPT can dramatically improve overall output quality.
ChatGPT is emerging as an essential collaborator in the world of journalism, where staying ahead of the competition is important, with enticing headlines, innovative story angles, and engaging descriptions. Journalists can leverage this smart AI tool to create captivating headlines, build fresh narratives, and even fine-tune meta descriptions for maximum impact.
Moreover, the use of AI in journalism not only simplifies content creation, but it also has the potential to improve website SEO and the overall reader experience. ChatGPT prompts tailored for journalists can lead to new opportunities for creativity, efficiency, and optimization in their narrative efforts. Let’s look at some of the best ChatGPT prompts that journalists can use.
Since a prompt is the only input that AI chatbots like ChatGPT take, it is important to get the prompt right. Writing an effective ChatGPT prompt requires precision, clarity, and context. Whether you're looking for a title, extensive information, ChatGPT to do a fact-check, or different angles for a story, here's a brief overview of the fundamentals for creating a powerful ChatGPT prompt.
Prompts need to be specific to the output required
While writing the prompt, clearly describe the output you want. Make the prompt obvious, whether it's for a story title, a meta description, a synopsis, or specific information. Include any constraints, such as character limits, to ensure accuracy. For example:
“Give me interesting and fascinating title options for my story about sustainable living in India. I want the title to be no more than 60 characters long."
Add context specific to your story in your prompt
The reply from ChatGPT is only as good as the input prompt. While writing the prompt, give ChatGPT some context on what the topic is about to get better answers. A brief overview helps generate more relevant and insightful responses. For example:
"Draft an introduction for an article exploring the ecological impact of sustainable practices in urban living." Alternatively, you can also ask ChatGPT to “list out pointers on the ecological impact of sustainable practices and mention benefits for each pointer.”
Emulate an Expert
If you are seeking insights or an expert opinion, you can always instruct ChatGPT to respond in a specific voice or perspective. This adds credibility and depth to the generated content. For instance:
"Offer a tech expert's viewpoint on the future of renewable energy, discussing recent advancements and potential challenges."
You can ask follow-up questions to ChatGPT to dig deeper and uncover more information. With recent improvements, ChatGPT Plus now has a larger conversation memory, allowing it to grasp follow-up inquiries more easily. For example:
You can paste the article you’ve written and ask ChatGPT to "Suggest a headline for the article.". As a follow-up, you can also ask for three highlights from the article.
If you feel that the initial response from ChatGPT is not perfect, you can always refine your prompt. Experiment with different phrasing, include additional details, or specify the tone to guide ChatGPT towards a more accurate output. You can highlight the portion of the response you want to tweak and
"Create an engaging introduction for an article exploring the impact of AI on healthcare, emphasizing the potential benefits and ethical considerations. Limit: 120 words."You can then select the output and add more inputs, such as “Focus more on the benefits of using AI to track health parameters.”
In today's ever-changing and dynamic digital environment, journalists are embracing new tools to boost their creativity, efficiency, and narrative abilities. Let's go deeper and look at how ChatGPT prompts might help journalists create compelling storylines, streamline research, and move through the challenging world of news reporting.
Generating new article topics
Previously, journalists struggled to come up with new and intriguing article topics. But now, with the help of ChatGPT, they can get multiple article topic options in seconds with the help of a simple prompt.
Prompt: Help me brainstorm article topics based on the growth of EV vehicles. What businesses would it impact?
Creating diverse perspectives on a topic and leveraging ChatGPT as an idea board
Journalists can also use ChatGPT to generate multiple and unique perspectives on specific issues by using it as an idea board.
For example, while writing a post-cricket match analysis, you can feed your ideas into ChatGPT and ask it for other perspectives that can be used to convey the event. ChatGPT Plus is preferred since it is connected to the internet and provides up-to-date information.
Use ChatGPT for research
While covering breaking news or a story, you can ask ChatGPT for a synopsis of previous events to provide more context to your audience. Alternatively, you can feed it article links to previous stories published in your publication for reference.
Prompt: Summarize the events in my articles (URL1, URL2, and so on) and give me a paragraph to highlight the events that have occurred so far.”
Write summaries for follow-up articles
Leveraging ChatGPT to write summaries for follow-up articles is a powerful strategy for efficient and comprehensive event coverage.
Journalists can further refine these summaries by using follow-up prompts to ask specific questions, seek additional context, or request elaboration on particular aspects of the event.
ChatGPT to write summaries for follow-up articles, helping you cover the events that have taken place so far. You can also ask it for a chronology of events leading to the current status for your audience.
Leverage ChatGPT for fact-checking
When faced with a specific claim or statement, journalists can prompt ChatGPT with a fact-checking inquiry. For example:
"Verify the accuracy of the statement: [Claim]. Look for credible sources online and provide citations to support or refute this claim."
ChatGPT can then search the internet for relevant information and present findings along with appropriate citations. However, it's crucial to keep in mind that while ChatGPT can assist in retrieving information, the quality and accuracy of the results depend on the sources available online and the specificity of the query.
Summarize or get insights from large documents
ChatGPT is also a useful tool for document summarization and data extraction. ChatGPT uses powerful natural language processing capabilities to extract key points from large documents and provide short summaries.
With ChatGPT Plus, users have the added advantage of document upload functionality, allowing them to directly provide documents for analysis. For example, a finance journalist can feed the earnings report of a company and ask ChatGPT to bring out specifics with respect to capital spent and net profits earned.
Use ChatGPT for interview prep.
For a journalist, ChatGPT is a must-have tool for interview preparation. You can use it to generate insightful questions and simulate interview scenarios. You can input relevant details about the interviewee or topic for quick background research or practice with ChatGPT as both interviewer and interviewee to expect responses and improve your questioning technique.
Additionally, you can also seek help in drafting introductory and closing statements. Plus, ChatGPT can also be used to verify facts, generate follow-up questions, and even assist with initial transcription after the interview.
Get started on a story with a catchy hook
I’m sure we’ve all faced writer’s block when writing an article at some point. This becomes frustrating when you are tasked with pushing out a time-sensitive article. You can start by providing key details about the topic, major points, or essence of the story and ask ChatGPT to generate engaging and opening lines or hooks.
You can also experiment with different angles, emotions, or perspectives to see what resonates.
Here are some of the few ways journalists can leverage AI writing tools such as ChatGPT. If you haven’t tried it yet, we would recommend you test the waters with what AI can do for your newsroom.
