We’ve been building AI-powered tools for Newspack newsrooms, and we’re ready to start putting them in your hands.
Today we’re introducing Experimental tools, a new section in your Newspack settings where you can opt in to features we’re actively developing. We’re launching with two tools: the Roundup block and the Editorial assistant.
Before we get into what they do, we want to address something we’ve heard clearly from publishers.
We know AI is complicated for newsrooms
Some of you are excited about AI. Some of you are cautious. Some of your newsrooms have union agreements that restrict or prohibit the use of AI-generated content. All of those positions are legitimate, and we’ve designed this feature set with all of them in mind.
Here’s what that means in practice:
Everything is off by default. No AI features will appear in your site until a site admin deliberately turns them on. Nothing activates automatically, and nothing changes in your published content.
Only site administrators can enable these tools. This is a newsroom-level decision, not something an individual editor can toggle on their own. The people who enable these tools should be the people with the authority to make that decision for your organization.
Every tool is opt-in and opt-out. You can turn any tool off at any time, and your existing content is never affected.
What’s available
Roundup block
If you use Newspack’s newsletter tools, this one is for you. Select a set of posts, and the Roundup block drafts summaries for your newsletter — saving you the time of writing each one from scratch.
The output is always a draft. It appears in your editor where you can review, edit, rewrite, or discard it before anything is published. Think of it as a starting point, not a finished product.
You can customize how it writes by adding editorial guidelines. Tell it about your voice, your audience, what language to use or avoid. Those preferences shape every draft it generates.
Editorial assistant
Editorial assistant is a sidebar panel in the post editor that offers suggestions as you work on an article. We’re starting with three features:
Headlines: Generates alternative headline options optimized for different contexts like search, social, and clarity. Each suggestion includes a short explanation of why it might work.
Key takeaways: Pulls out the three main points from your article that readers should remember. Useful for TLDR sections, newsletter summaries, or just checking that your piece communicates what you intended.
Pull quotes: Identifies two or three strong sentences from your article that work well as standalone quotes, with a note on why each one stands out.
Every suggestion is just that — a suggestion. You decide what to use, what to change, and what to ignore.
How the tools handle your content
These tools use OpenAI to generate suggestions. When you use them, the content of the post(s) you’re working on is sent to OpenAI’s API for processing. OpenAI retains this data for up to 30 days for abuse monitoring, then deletes it. Your content is not used to train their models and cannot appear in ChatGPT or any other OpenAI product.
We need your feedback
We’re calling these “experimental” because that’s what they are. They work, they’re supported, and we think they’re useful. But they’ll get better with your input.
After you’ve had some time with these tools, we’ll check in and ask how they’re working for your newsroom. That feedback directly shapes what these tools become and whether we keep building them.
If you have thoughts at any point, there’s a feedback link in your Experimental tools settings. We’re listening.
Getting started
The Experimental tools section is now available in your Newspack settings. Log in as a site administrator, go to Newspack > Settings > Experimental tools, and enable whichever tools interest you. Help documentation for each tool is available here.
