The Next Gen News Sprint Tool Kit: What 12 newsrooms learned from building AI-powered products for next gen audiences
When newsrooms set out to reach a new generation of news consumers, the first instinct is often to treat it as a distribution problem: take what you already produce and reshape it for the platforms where younger people spend their time. But a product is more than its format. It rests on a clear audience need, a path for people to find it, a way to know whether it worked, and a business logic behind it.
That broader strategic view was at the heart of the GNI × NPA AI-Powered Next Gen News Sprint, an eight-month program we ran this year with support from the Google News Initiative. Twelve U.S. local newsrooms built an AI-powered product for people ages 18 to 28, guided by a process designed to make them look at the whole picture – from conducting audience research to testing and evaluating a prototype.
Today we're publishing the resource that came out of this process: the Next Gen News Sprint Tool Kit, a free set of worksheets, frameworks and decision guides that turns the program’s eight months of experimentation into something any newsroom can use to build products for next-gen audiences.
“The Next Gen News Sprint reflects how NPA works with newsrooms: we help them turn audience understanding into strategy, then build the capacity to act on it. We are proud to see 12 local news products shaped by what next-gen audiences need, and prouder of the teams behind them, who deepened how they build with AI. The tool kit will help other newsrooms do the same. It is meant for any newsroom working to better serve a new generation of news consumers,” said Feli Carrique, Executive Director, News Product Alliance.
What's in the tool kit
The tool kit proposes a journey, but each of its six sections also stands on its own.
Section 1 | Localize the findings. Find where the Next Gen News 2 insights show up in your community: audit what your team knows, research the gaps and synthesize what you hear into a strategic challenge. It includes a snapshot of how the Tampa Bay Times and Deep South Today used a data inventory to decide who to ask in their research.
Section 2 | Design your idea. A Double Diamond design sprint that turns your strategic challenge into a prototype your audience can react to. See how The Texas Tribune and The Philadelphia Inquirer matched next-gen needs to their own organizational strengths.
Section 3 | Set the AI foundations. Four decisions before you plan development: whether the problem calls for AI, where it sits in the product, whether you can sustain it and what counts as acceptable output. The LA Times and Advance Local show where the technology made sense for them.
Section 4 | Write the plan. Turn a tested prototype into a road map with an audience segment, first version, metrics, owners, timeline and pivot criteria. The Minnesota Star Tribune and The Salt Lake Tribune explain how they kept their road maps honest.
Section 5 | Stress-test your idea. Put unfinished work in front of your audience, define the behavior that would validate your hypotheses and write if-then scenarios before the data arrives. Graham Media Group and Chicago Public Media walk through their testing cycles before a wide release.
Section 6 | Ship and evaluate. Rally the whole newsroom behind the launch, then learn whether next-gen audiences find the product, use it and come back, and whether you should scale, iterate or kill it. The Boston Globe and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution share how they prepared their product launches and what they're reading in the first audience signals.
What the newsrooms built
Each newsroom came out of the program with a product. Here's what they built:
Advance Local: Jersey For Real, a weekly newsletter for next-gen audiences in New Jersey.
Boston Globe: The Brief, a limited-beta iOS and web experience that packages Boston reporting into a finite daily lineup of source-linked cards, with AI-drafted summaries that editors approve before publication.
Chicago Public Media: Chicago.com Guides, a shareable local-knowledge product that users can save, create and remix, designed as an entry point into Chicago.com neighborhood communities.
Deep South Today: A crowdfunding platform that lets readers fund specific journalism projects through micro-donations.
Graham Media Group: Community Creator Hub, a neighborhood community page on KPRC's site powered by local creators.
LA Times: LA Interactive Lifestyle Planner, an upgrade to LA Times lifestyle guides with saved places and Metro transit overlays for people new to LA or a new neighborhood.
Salt Lake Tribune: A "What you can do" box at the end of articles that gives readers ways to act on the issue a story covers.
Tampa Bay Times: A restaurant recommendation experience built as a new content type in Arc, launching this winter with short-form vertical videos for discovery.
Texas Tribune: A candidate matching quiz that pairs first-time voters with a statewide candidate in three Texas races.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Daily Digest, five personalized articles delivered each morning in the AJC app, with opt-in push alerts.
The Minnesota Star Tribune: The Brief, a five-minute weekday morning catch-up on the stories affecting Minnesota, with swipe navigation and a "you're caught up" end state.
The Philadelphia Inquirer: Inquirer Food Bot, a chatbot that gives personalized restaurant recommendations from picks by the Inquirer's critic and food reporters.
Use it, share it
The tool kit is built for newsrooms of different sizes and serving different audience groups, so you can start with the section that matches where in the process your team is right now.
