How AI and Tools Are Transforming Journalism and Education by Jeremy Caplan by Kazuki Nakayashiki

How AI and Tools Are Transforming Journalism and Education by Jeremy Caplan

Kazuki Nakayashiki

Nov 1, 2024 11:05 PM

Summary

Introduction of Guest (00:09)
- The episode features Jeremy Caplan, Director of Teaching and Learning at CUNY's Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and author of "Wondertools," discussing the influence of digital tools on journalism and education.
Course Structure and Focus (01:03)
- Caplan teaches an entrepreneurial journalism class called "Startup Sprint," where students learn to create micro-ventures (like newsletters and podcasts), build communities, and ensure financial sustainability.
Inspiration and Mindset (04:02)
- The class begins with teaching students about inspiration, showing successful examples of entrepreneurial journalists to motivate them. Caplan emphasizes a self-inward approach, assessing skills, knowledge, interests, and networks.
Alumni Networking and Career Paths (10:09)
- Caplan discusses the robust alumni network from the program and various paths graduates take, including roles in traditional news organizations, new journalism startups, and launching their own media projects.
Personal Journey into Journalism (14:25)
- Caplan shares his curiosity-driven journey into journalism, underscoring the importance of questioning unexamined practices, creative expression, and the dynamic and diverse nature of journalistic work.
AI's Role in Journalism (37:20)
- Caplan speaks on how AI tools are changing the landscape of journalism by assisting in research, organizing information, and improving multimedia editing, although he acknowledges the importance of maintaining a human touch in storytelling.
Advice for Aspiring Journalists and Writers (40:40)
- He encourages establishing daily writing rituals, seeking inspiration from surroundings, and aiming for small, consistent efforts over sporadic large tasks, emphasizing that the legacy left behind is through positive impacts on others.

Transcript

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Glasp Talk. Today, we are excited to have Jeremy Caplan with us. Jeremy is the Director of Teaching and Learning at CUNY's Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, where he plays a pivotal role in shaping the next generation of creative and entrepreneurial journalists. He is also the author of Wondertools, a newsletter where he shares practical tools that help streamline daily life and maximize

productivity. With a rich background in journalism, including writing for iMagazine, Yahoo! Internet Live, and Newsweek, Jeremy is an expert in the intersection of journalism, technology, and education. Today, we will dive into how digital tools are transforming journalism and education, and explore some of Jeremy's insights of teaching and learning in the modern era. Thank you for joining today, Jeremy. It's a pleasure to be with you. Thank you.

So first of all, could you tell us what you teach at your class for aspiring journalists at grad school? The primary class I'm teaching at the moment is called Startup Sprint. It's an entrepreneurial journalism class where we help people think through how to create something new that is a micro-venture in journalism, so a newsletter, a podcast, a niche site, and we help them think through what the product is, what the content is, what form and format

it takes, what style and approach it takes, what purpose it serves, what impact it can have from a product point of view. We help them think through how to build a community around that or how to engage an existing community around that, how to grow an audience for that. And then the third part of it is the sustainability piece. How do you actually generate some revenue and manage costs and make it sustainable from a business or financial

perspective so that it's an entrepreneurial venture that's sustainable and viable, and also impactful and meaningful. And so that's a class that gives people exposure to the world of journalism as it is today as opposed to as it was a generation ago or sometime in the past. And the idea is both to train people with entrepreneurial skills, but also to help them develop a kind of open mindset, a creative and curious mindset to encourage

them to feel empowered to create their own new things. We don't just have to work for other people in the journalism realm. We can also create our own new niche journalism ventures, which historically we could never really do as individual journalists. We didn't have the power of the press in our pockets. We didn't have access to the capital we needed to reach the masses.

We didn't have broadcast studios to produce expensive multimedia to distribute around the world through existing radio networks or TV platforms. But now we can reach people around the world with the devices in our pockets or with our laptops at very little, if any, cost. So we have tremendous power and potential, and we have to figure out how to harness that and make effective use of it for the benefit of the communities that we're serving. And so that's the class that focuses on that.

And also developing a new class on AI for journalism and how journalists can capitalize on AI and how journalists can make use of AI effectively and creatively and ethically, and how AI is impacting the world of journalism as well. So those are a couple of classes. And then I teach occasional workshops on other related topics around digital journalism and how journalists can work effectively on related topics. Yeah, that's really exciting. And also AI in journalism is a really interesting topic.

But before that, you know, diving into it, and I'm curious, you know, do usually students join your class, you know, with an idea or without an idea, without having an idea? Both. There are students who come in without any idea, but sort of a curiosity or a question. There are people that already have a community that they've been serving, but they want to serve the community in a different way, or they want to restart, or they want to improve

what they're doing. So there are people in both of those, both of those buckets. I see. I see. And then what is the first thing you teach to a student? You know, is that a mindset or like a big picture about what's happening now? So like a macro view, you know, do you have some something you teach at first? First comes inspiration. So before you can do something new, you have to have the inspiration, the motivation to do that.

And you have to see that other people have done it and can do it to know that you can do it yourself. So we first start with inspiration, showing people examples of creative entrepreneurial journalists from around the world, including some of our former students and former participants in our program, who are people just like the people sitting in the seats of those students. So they know it's not just someone very different in some other context, but someone just like them, so they can do it as well.

Also helping inspire them from their own capabilities and their own potential. So a lot of times we think about entrepreneurship as coming from external, from an external focus, meaning we look at a problem, we look at the needs of a community, we look at something in the world that's broken needs to be fixed. And that's certainly a valuable lens through which to see entrepreneurship. However, it's not the only lens.

Another lens is to look inward at our capabilities. There's a model called effectual entrepreneurship, where the idea is really to look inward and think about what are the capabilities that you have that put you in a unique position to create something impactful. And specifically, I think of it as a skin, I call it a skin framework, SKIN, meaning your skills, what skills do you have that are distinct, and that are meaningful to you and valuable to the world.

So things you can do with your hands, right, or things you can do physically, or that are skill related, like translation, or like coding, or like data visualization, or other things that are skills that you have that other people may not have. Knowledge, right, so that's the brain part. So it's the hands and then the brain, right? The brain, the knowledge you have is like the, the knowledge you have about based on your lived experience, but also the

knowledge you have about a particular culture or about a particular topic within politics or science or the arts or sports or whatever it might be. And then there's your interests or passions, right? So it's not enough just to have a skill at something or to know something about it. It's also helpful to have a passion around it. And often as entrepreneurs, we benefit from having a passion for what we do so that we can weather the most difficult

periods, right, when we're not growing, or people aren't responding, or aren't emailing us back, or aren't using our product, or aren't liking our stories, or our social media posts, or whatever it is. If we're not resilient, we won't succeed. And if we're not passionate, we won't be resilient. And so we need that passion that underlies our motivation for the topic or the venture in order to thrive.

So we have students look at these questions like, what are your skills? What are the skills that you have? Because invariably people have more skills and more knowledge and more interests and passions than they realize on the surface. And so we need to dive deeper into our own capabilities to source that inspiration and that motivation that will lead to momentum. And so in the skin framework, the last part of it is the net, the Anver network.

So in addition to your own skills and your own knowledge and your own passion or interests, you also have a network of people that you're connected to from your life's experience. And however old you are, you've been part of different clubs and organizations and schools and jobs and personal networks, social networks, family networks, religious networks, all kinds of networks of people that we've interacted with on certainly online networks of various kinds.

So we all have bigger networks in many cases than we realize as well, with different levels of contacts, right? Some are very superficial contacts, some are deeper contacts, but assessing that network that we all have provides another valuable insight into some of the capabilities that we are going to be able to benefit from by virtue of being connected to people who can help us in various ways. Because as entrepreneurs, we can't do everything ourselves.

In fact, there's a limited amount we can do with just our 168 hours in the week. And so we need teammates, we need partners, but we also need supporters in our network who can help introduce us to someone or can help mention our podcast or our newsletter or our website in their newsletter or their podcast or invite us to appear on their show or invite us to attend their event or give us guidance or give us insight.

So when we look at these four things inward, we see we have skills, we have knowledge, we have interests, and we have a network that can empower us to then address a question or serve a community or address a moment that we have in time that provides a catalyst for this particular venture. So that's what we start with. That's how we start the process. Yeah, that's, that's amazing. And in terms of network, do you have to alumni network, you know, because some student comes to your class and graduate and start their own things.

And but you know, as a network in terms of network, you know, if you have alumni network, so that people can support each other. And also, I'm interested in like, what are the, you know, the grad students who graduate from your class, you know, their paths or career after after the class of graduating your class. We do have an alumni network. So we have hundreds of people who have now been through one or another version of our entrepreneurial program.

We started the entrepreneurial journalism program in 2010, here at CUNY at the City University of New York, the Graduate School of Journalism. And we had a number of cohorts in person, who had come for six months, essentially one semester. And then, since 2020, we've been running online cohorts. And those are 100 day kind of entrepreneurial boot camps, you might call them, where people develop their venture.

And there are a lot now of people who have been through one or another iteration of those programs, and they do serve as a network for one another. In fact, many of them stay in touch and collaborate and find ways of supporting one another. And they're on WhatsApp groups together, each cohort, and they're also in touch with each other to support each other as accountability buddies, and as collaborators and as supporters and cheerleaders for one another.

And I hope that continues to be the case because people working in entrepreneurship, as you all know, and anyone who works in an entrepreneurial kind of capacity knows, oftentimes you're doing isolated work on your own kitchen table or in front of your own computer by yourself. And so it's helpful to know there's a network of people who you have something in common with some shared experience, some shared background. And we do have that network.

And in terms of your question about what are they, what do they do? There's a variety of different paths people take some work for traditional news organizations and try to work in a kind of entrepreneurial capacity. For example, we've had people work at the Yomiuri Shimbun and the Asahi Shimbun, for example, in NHK in Japan, and they kind of work in innovative roles, innovation or entrepreneurship kind of roles in those kinds of

organizations, in some cases. In other cases, people work for new kinds of journalism organizations, like the new ones that are either taking shape or have taken shape in recent years. These are places like BuzzFeed or Axios or the 19th or Punchbowl or, you know, any of these number of capital B, any of a number of kind of organizations that are recently emerging and doing new kinds of journalism or doing journalism in new ways

or kind of part of this most recent era of entrepreneurial journalism. And then a third batch runs their own ventures and focuses on doing that. And so these are people who have founded projects like Skill Crush or Narratively, or How India Lives or Data N, all of these different kinds of projects around the world that are creating new kinds of journalism, serving new kinds of audiences, filling in gaps in the news and information

ecosystem. So that's a portion of the entrepreneurial alums. And then there are people who are in the fourth bucket where they're just doing all kinds of different things. They might work for some kind of nonprofit organization, or they might be taking care of an elderly relative or a child or, you know, doing some of the other many things we all do in this in this world in our short lives. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Yeah. After listening, you are like an introduction of the class.

I'm glad to thinking like, you know, I want to take your class. So yeah, if I hope it's online course, but yeah, someday in my life. Yeah. And so before, like, you know, teaching at university, so you started your career as a writer, right? So maybe, yeah, so not maybe. So you started working as like the Paris Review, then so, you know, starting as a reporter at Newsweek.

So what made you think, oh, I want to become a writer or like a journalist at the first point? Well, the first thing I would say is that I've always been a curious person. I always have a lot of questions. If I go on a tour, I'm always the person who has more questions left at the end and wants to keep the person afterwards to keep asking them more questions. And I've always liked reading about things and learning about things.

And I think journalism attracted me because it's a field where you get to ask a lot of questions. You have to ask a lot of questions. You have to learn a lot of things. You have to keep asking questions and you have to keep trying to understand things so you can explain them to other people and help other people to understand them. And I've also always been someone who had some kind of skepticism about doctrines that didn't seem to have a basis in thoughtful rationale.

In other words, rules for rules sake or things that were done because they've always been done that way or approaches that were just thoughtlessly repeated over the years that served to harm people or leave people out or didn't optimize the experience people had in various contexts, whether that's an educational context or in a hospital context or in a legal context. I mean, there's so many contexts in our in our in our world where things are done for reasons that aren't clear and that

maybe aren't well thought out. And they're often done because they've always been done that way or because there's some some one person who has an incentive for them to be done that way to the detriment of many other people. And so I've always been kind of someone who's skeptical of those things and concerned about those things and wanting those things not to be that way or wanting to challenge those things when I felt that other people

weren't challenging them or weren't questioning them or were just blind blindly accepting them. And I think that's also a characteristic of people who are interested in journalism is that we in many, many cases, many journalists want to understand why things are and maybe challenge things that are abuses of power or hold the power, hold the people with power accountable or at least or at least question the particular practices of power and implementations

of power or implementations of authority or implementations of kind of institutional bureaucracies and those sorts of things. And. And that could be, you know, corporate power to or technological power or political power, a lot of different kinds of power and a lot of different kinds of hierarchy. Anyway, so I've kind of had a skepticism or curiosity about some of those things.

And I think those are those are two, two motivations for me to be interested in journalism. A third was that I like to write. I like to do creative activities. I've never been particularly artistic from a drawing point of view. In fact, we play family drawing games and I still struggle to draw, you know, the most basic things. But but I've always been very interested in creative expression of various other kinds. So, in fact, before I was a journalist, I was a violinist and I've always loved the violin.

I've played violin since I was a young child, in fact, inspired by or helped by the Suzuki method, the Japanese Suzuki method of violin training from the time I was very young. And in fact, as a child, I had got a chance to meet Mr. Suzuki himself when he was very old. He came to the Suzuki Institute in Wisconsin, where I studied as a child in the summer. Anyway, my point being, I was interested in violin as a means of creative expression.

And I think there is something in journalists and journalism that also allows for us to have creative expression. We shape a story, we shape an article, we shape a piece of video or a piece of audio or whatever data visualization or anything we're creating that's journalistic in any way. We shape that and there's an art to it. There's a craft to it. It's not pure information. It's information shaped and curated and sensitively managed and communicated. And there's an art and a craft to that. And it has to do with words.

And I love words and I love reading. And so those things combined, I think my sense of curiosity, my sense of skepticism, my interest in kind of creative expression and my interest in words. Those things all shaped my interest in journalism and my motivation to be in the field. And the last thing I would say is that I've been indecisive at times. I didn't want to commit to one thing. And I'm also easily bored.

So I didn't want to commit to one thing that I'd be doing all the time. And no insult to people who do a routine job and do the same monotonous thing every day, because some people may really enjoy that and may benefit from that. And that may suit some people. But for me, the idea of sitting at a desk and pushing the same kind of paper over and over every day or stamping the same kind of form every day or doing a routine task on an assembly line kind of work day after day, hour after hour, I didn't feel like that would be motivating or

inspiring to me over a long period of time. And so instead doing something where each week or each month would be something different, where I'd have to keep learning new things, keep writing new things, where the technology would keep changing. That kind of was exciting and inspiring, where I'd get to meet a lot of amazing people in different fields. As a journalist, you get to interview people in all different kinds of professional domains and people who are also just interesting

people for a variety of different kinds of reasons. And that was very exciting and very appealing. So for all those reasons, journalism was very appealing to me and has remained appealing to me ever since. And that's why I'm really proud and honored to be able to teach other people about journalism and to remain in the field as an educator. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah.

And also, you know, after you worked at several publications, like Newsweek and also Time Magazine, you also started your own newsletter, Wondertools, right? And I'm curious why and what's the motivation or why did you start writing individually on a newsletter, like on Substar? In April of 2020, we had just seen the beginning of the pandemic and I was sick. I was lonely. I was anxious about the world and about the pandemic. I also wanted to be putting some positive energy out into the world because I saw so many other people who are lonely and sick and

also anxious. And so I wanted to, rather than wallowing in that anxiety and that sickness and that sense of isolation, I wanted to put something positive out there. And one thing that I felt that I could do, I was not a first responder, I was not a physician, I couldn't do anything on the scientific side, but I felt like I could help in a tiny little way or try to help in a tiny little way.

Some of my colleagues, fellow educators, were suddenly thrust into this remote teaching online, which many had never done before. And journalists, similarly, who were former colleagues and friends who were also struggling to adapt to this new online-only world where they couldn't be in physical contact with anyone, anywhere, at any time, all of a sudden. So this was a dramatic moment and that was April of 2020. And so I thought, okay, I have been on my computer and on my devices for years and exploring tools and liking tools and finding tools that are useful for me.

I can share what's been useful for me with other people in a way that hopefully will be helpful to them and help them avoid having to figure all this stuff out from scratch. And so that's what I started doing. And there's another piece of the motivation, which was that I had been teaching entrepreneurial journalism for quite some time. And I always had this little itch at the back of my mind that said, why don't you have your

own entrepreneurial venture? And the truth was, I'd helped a lot of students and worked with students and collaborated with students. And I saw those as my ventures, even though they weren't really mine. I saw them as things that were out there in the world that I was proud that a former student or a student had created. Even if I didn't have a direct role, I felt proud that they were creating things.

And so I felt like I had an indirect role, but that still left me with this itch. Well, okay, but why haven't I created my own thing of some kind? Because I do believe you learn best by doing, not just by listening or not just by thinking or not just by helping other people do, but actually by doing it yourself. So I felt like I needed to do that. So I would really learn. And also the era has changed. The era was new, this creator era was emerging, and I really needed to understand how this worked, not just from a theoretical point of view, but from

a practical point of view. Like if you're creating a newsletter, what are the practical daily, weekly, monthly things you need to do to make that succeed? Again, from a product point of view, from a growth point of view, from a sustainability revenue point of view, from an operations point of view. And I needed to know that by experiencing that because it wasn't enough just to read reports about it or to interview people or ask people or just make assumptions.

So I needed to have that lived experience. And so for those were the major reasons why I started it. And I also saw this moment of explosive creativity in the technology realm. So we were on the cusp of this new AI era. We were on a new era in terms of interactivity. The social era was moving into a new chapter of the social media era. A whole new range of hardware and physical devices were coming out and changing hardware technology in new ways.

And there was just a lot going on in the technological realm that I felt like the journalism sphere covering that was shrinking. And there was room for some new guidance for people seeking guidance from an independent voice who could explain things and simplify things and be concise and be practical and provide some service journalism and help people understand some of what was emerging. So that was the opportunity I saw and that was why I dived in to capitalize on it. I see. Yeah, that's amazing.

Yeah, I've been following and subscribed to your newsletter and thank you for sharing your insightful tools and productivity tips and hacks. I appreciate it. And also, I always wonder, you cover a lot of tools, and pros and cons, and also sometimes pricing, and oh, this is not good, or this is good or something. And I'm curious, how do you keep your bias low? Because people have preference, like, oh, I love this series.

But if you review the competitor tools, you might have bias, might be biased. Do you have something in mind to remove bias, or do you keep the bias as is? I think we all definitely have a bias about a lot of different kinds of things. We have a lot of biases, right? Like, I use a Mac computer every day. I don't use a Windows machine every day. So that affects my experience with Windows machines. It affects my perspective on Mac versus Windows, and so forth and so on. So sometimes, I can use multiple tools.

Like with transcription tools, I use a whole range of different transcription tools, because I want to be open to a lot of them. I want to see how they differ from one another. I want to see the different benefits and the nuances of one versus the other. And I want to avoid assuming that one tool is always the best or the only tool or has the features that everyone might need, because in fact, there are a variety of different tools in that space.

But I can't do that for every single category and for every type of hardware, for example. So I have to pick certain things, and I've picked the Mac platform. And I try to educate myself beyond just Mac and Apple and iOS. So I try to explore other platforms as much as I can and learn from others. But the reality is, like most of the time, my content tends to lean a little bit more towards the Apple side, towards the iOS side, and the web side, right, which is not particular to any

particular operating system. I mean, the web is kind of a universal, mostly universal kind of platform for many things. So that tends to bridge across platforms. But my point is that, you know, people who are reading this closely over time might notice that I'm not covering Android as much as I'm covering iOS kinds of things, for example. And so that's just a path that I pick, because that's what I can manage to do given my limited bandwidth as a solopreneur,

right, as like one person doing this, and as the person doing the product and the growth and the sustainability and the operations and all of that, right. In terms of other kinds of bias or preferences, I try to, I work with a lot of students, I work with people of different levels as a coach and an observer, you know, I see how my parents use technology, I see how my daughters use technology, I see how my friends use technology.

So I try to keep a perspective that allows me to be aware of different levels and different interests and different reasons why people are using different things. And so when I'm using things, and when I'm writing about things, I'm trying to keep in my mind, multiple perspectives and how this might be relevant for people at different levels or with different interests or different goals. And yet I'm conveying my, you know, my experience and I try to be as objective as possible and try to

back that up with examples and specific cases so people can decide for themselves ultimately. And I can show here's what I use it for, here's why I think it's useful, here's an example of that, here's a limitation of that, here's an alternative to that. And so hopefully with that information, people can then say, oh yeah, that sounds like it might be useful, I want to try it. Or it doesn't sound like it's a good fit for me because I'm not doing that kind of work or I don't need that kind

of solution. But this alternative sounds interesting, or this alternative sounds like one I want to explore myself. So I think of what I'm doing as like a starting point for people or an introduction to the tool or the resource and a kind of like a quick guide so that they can get started, get going deeper. But in many cases, people will have to explore further for themselves if they want to see how relevant it is for their own use case.

Thank you for sharing it. And so the viewer of the productivity tool, so I think you know the trend of the productivity tools and so yeah, you know the pros and the cons, right? Then so yeah, with like much information and knowledge about it, so you can make your own product. So are you interested in making your new venture or making a new productivity tool by yourself? Also like, so as a reviewer of productivity tools, so do you have any hot topics in productivity tools

or like any topics or tools you are interested in at this moment? Maybe AI or? Yeah, yeah. If I could live 50 lives, you know, and one of them I'd love to be creating a lot of products. I think that's a really interest of mine is to think about product interfaces. I have a lot of conversation with product creators and entrepreneurs who are making different kinds of products and people who are running the companies in some cases that I end

up writing about. I have conversations with them to understand the product and to see demos and often have conversations about the interface and what's working, what's not, and what I think is problematic or what I think works really well. And I like those conversations. I like thinking about how the products work and what they could do differently and how they could be better than they are now.

Because I also think of that as a craft, right? It's like an art and a skill and a craft in terms of making the product useful and interesting and figuring out the balance of new features and keep balancing simplicity with utility and, you know, all kinds of interesting questions. But the reality is like I've, my training is not in that, in the technical skills of creating new products necessarily. And we all have 168 hours of being awake, being alive each week if we're alive.

And we have, you know, a hundred or so hours of being awake, you know, and we have some number less than that of being awake and like available for work. And so given that limited number of hours, like we have to prioritize. And so my priority as of now has not been to do that, but to do these other things that we've been talking about in terms of journalism and writing and teaching and being with my family in particular, and then occasional hobbies like, you know, reading and violin and chamber music. So that's the first question.

And the second question was about, oh, trends are kind of like areas of particular interest. Yeah, there's one that's a particular interest to me that's been kind of bubbling up for me for quite a while now, which is the next generation of note-taking tools. So this is to me, so central to our experience of productivity is this idea of personal knowledge management, right? PKM, it's not new to people who have been in this world, right? This has not been a brand new topic.

It's been a topic we've been talking about and thinking about in this world for a while, but there's been some interesting progress, and AI has enabled some of that progress, and there's still some challenges. It's still not resolved. We still don't have the perfect thing that works for everyone, and we may not ever have a perfect tool that will work for everyone, but I think we're getting a lot closer to having some tools that are going to address a lot of the challenges that have prevented

notes from being as useful as they could be for a long time, decades, centuries, et cetera. So I think this is actually a really, really important area of technology and of software and of computing and organization, and there are a bunch of new tools that I think are giving us a peek into what this might look like when we have a note-taking tool that can help us surface the knowledge we already have, experiences we have, ideas we've had in ways that don't

require us to know exactly what we labeled things or how we tagged something or where we filed something or what system we were using when we took that note or whether we took the note on the phone or on the laptop or whether we took it at home or in another place or whether we took it online or offline, like there's so many things that we have to know in order to find notes now in many cases and that we have to remember and we have to proactively search for things and we have

to remember either the folder or the tag, et cetera, and these new systems I think are starting to give us a peek into what it might look like if we didn't have to do that work and the systems did it for us and we were just left to be creative and come up with the ideas and reflect on the ideas, like what our human minds do best, and so I'm talking about a generation of tools that include not just Obsidian but Capacities and Tana and Anytype and Lazy.

so and a number of others reflect many others that are basically allowing us to have a system that just works, that just works for us, that we can input easily from wherever we are, we can input with our voice, we can input by emailing something in, we can email it by clipping something in, we can email by, I mean, we can ingest something from other project tools that we're using on Slack or email or some other place, we can apply AI to it so it finds things, it

surfaces connections between things, it also potentially allows us to use AI to transform things, right, so our notes on a meeting like this one, a discussion like this one could be transformed into a summary email or transformed into a summary or into an outline or to a draft of a blog post or a script for a YouTube video or whatever it might be, and there's many different kinds of functions that are in that realm that we can use,

there's many different kinds of functions that are in that realm of what that notes tool can do, and there's different views on it by all those software makers and others, and mem.ai being another one, another example in that category, and all of these are taking interesting, unique perspective on it, slightly different, and offering some benefits and some drawbacks, and I just think this is a really exciting area where there are a lot of questions still to be

worked out and resolved, but I think there's the potential to unlock a tremendous amount of additional creativity and productivity and enjoyment for people given how many limitations the prior generation of Node software had, so that's an area where I'm really, really excited, and I think there's a lot of progress being made now, and these next few years I think will unlock even more interface innovation, application of AI in creative ways, voice

interfaces in interesting ways into our notes, collaboration with other people's notes in interesting ways, Roam Research was one of the kind of interesting new PKM tools a couple years ago, and they had an interesting approach to thinking about plugging in your graph with other people's graphs and finding ways of drawing connections, and then the idea of connecting these notes hubs, these personal knowledge management hubs with other tools in our information workflow,

so our highlighting tools, our reading tools, our Kindle, our Readwise, our other various kinds of tools that we use for ingesting information, even Snipt, like our podcast app, right, where we can save highlights on our podcast app, connecting all those tools with our notes and with our email so that we don't have all of these separate places we need to look for everything, I think that's also like a really powerful potential area where we kind of start to have a universal personal knowledge

hub rather than having like 20 different repositories for little bits and pieces of our work. I see, and is that the same for journalism? I mean, you know, how do you think AI will impact, you know, the journalism, you know, how people write, like, or, yeah, the media or format? Yeah, I mean, I think journalists rely a lot, like people in many fields rely a lot on researching, gathering information, sifting through information, identifying the most important,

prioritizing information, organizing information, then transforming the information into different stories and following up on certain aspects of the information. And so journalists will tremendously benefit, are already tremendously benefiting from tools like Cloud Projects or Mem.ai for organizing notes or Notebook LM from Google, or other tools that allow you to kind of like apply AI to your own notes.

Those are really powerful tools for journalists who oftentimes have large blocks of notes that are, you know, sometimes hard to find the needle in the haystack or find the signal from the noise. So yes, this definitely has a significant benefit to journalists. It allows them to find information more efficiently in large volumes of information. And that's going to be increasingly important as the volume of information produced in the world just grows exponentially, right? There are estimates that, you know, the majority of information by the end

of 2025 will be AI generated information that you see online, right? A lot of it will be AI generated. And if that's the case, there'll be a lot of low quality stuff and junk mixed into the higher quality signal stuff. So like journalists will need more tools to sort through all that and make sense of all that, analyze all that, organize all that, curate all that, synthesize all that, act on all that.

And also even to, in some cases, you know, assess the relevance and the connection to other things we've written about or other things we've been researching or other questions we've been exploring. So that all will be tremendously helpful. In terms of how AI is generally helpful to journalists, there's a lot of different ways. Doing menial technical cleanup work is an example in the multimedia realm. So removing background noise, filtering out background noise, removing filler words in audio, right, or video, adjusting color balance automatically.

These are the kinds of menial tasks that they may have a tiny bit of an artistic component. So I'm not suggesting that there's no human role in any case. In the case of This American Life, for example, the podcast, they're very careful about how much silence they remove. There's an art to that in their view, right? So that's a very artfully edited podcast. And they may not want to rely on AI to do all of that silence removal for them or removing all of the filler words for them

because they want to make that a human choice from an artistic perspective. And in some cases, that will remain the case. But in many other cases, it'll be more efficient and more functionally valuable for people to say, yeah, I'm okay with AI removing silences so that I can focus on the key aspects of the storytelling myself. And they'll use tools like Descript and many other AI-powered editing tools like Kapwing and so many others that are emerging to allow us to tell new

kinds of visual stories and audio stories with the help of AI tools, with the assistance of AI. Yeah, yeah, totally. Yes. And sorry, I know time is running out, but we have two more questions. Sure. Do you have some, what advice would you give to aspiring writers or journalists? Because our audience are aspiring writers or journalists and also entrepreneurs. What kind of advice would you give them? Establish rituals and habits.

So what we do daily or consistently is what makes us who we are and what defines in the long run, the quality and the impact of our work. So if we do a little bit of work or a little bit of focused work each day, and we progress towards our objectives in a consistent disciplined way, we will be more likely to make consistent progress than if we do something sporadically or inconsistently.

And so from a writerly point of view or a journalistic point of view, establishing a practice, a habit of spending a certain amount of time on certain things that are core to the work we do is a good way to ensure that you continually get better at something and that it becomes a part of your life on a consistent basis. Those small deposits of investments of time and effort pay off because they accumulate and aggregate in a way that's much more substantial when it's done consistently than when it's done sporadically or occasionally.

So in practical terms, this means setting aside a few minutes a day to write something every day, for example. It may mean also setting aside time to read something every day so we're continually learning. It may mean setting aside some time every day to learn or work on a particular skill. So if you're doing audio, creating a little bit of audio every day, or if you're doing video, thinking about creating a little video every day, or if you can't create the entire video each day,

doing some part of that process so you're continually moving forward and working towards progress. It's a journey that we're all on to continually strengthen our skills, improve our knowledge, and doing that as a habit and having a set time and having some ritual around it. The reason I think of that as a routine or ritual is that you want to get into the right mindset when you're doing that as well, especially among the busyness and

craziness of our lives, especially if you're living in a city and there's all sorts of stuff going on around you and lots of fast-paced life. It can help to have a certain chair we sit in or a certain desk we sit in or a certain tool we use, a pen or pencil or paper or whatever, something that inspires us or that makes us feel like this is a special moment when we're actually devoting our full focus, our full attention, to something.

One of the things I'm excited to test is a new device that's coming out where it measures your level of focus, a special kind of headphones, measures your focus level. Actually, it's able to measure your brain waves, essentially. I've tested it initially and found that it actually seems to do what it promises to do. We'll see upon further testing. The interesting thing about that to me is it really gives you a way of checking your assumptions about whether you are, in fact, really focused and measure how

much we are focused because, as many of us know, our minds tend to wander. We tend to drift. We don't necessarily bring our full selves to the activities that we're engaged in all the time. Nor should we. It's natural to be mind-wandering and that's helpful sometimes, but we want to ensure that we have at least some blocks of time where we're really deeply focused on one thing and one thing only, monotasking as opposed to multitasking.

When we monotask and really deeply focus on one thing, we are more apt to get deeper. When we get deeper, we're more apt to find something new and explore something that's different from our surface, from our usual, from our current level of skill or habit or whatever. That's where the interesting thing is. It's beneath the surface and that requires the focus. Getting to that focus in the midst of these crazy lives that we live, busy lives,

means having some kind of routine or ritual so that you, on a regular basis, have that practice. That would be the thing I would suggest to somebody is to establish that practice and to not aim high. There's often a saying like, aim high, reach for the stars, run a marathon, those kinds of things. If you can do that, that's great, but if you're starting from scratch or starting something new or trying to make a little bit of progress, much better to aim low.

Aim for something very minimal so that you can ensure that you do it and you become the kind of person who does that every day or at least regularly so that you don't prevent yourself from doing anything by trying to do everything. Done is better than perfect. Doing one thing, like one minute of something even, or five minutes or 10 minutes or one page or one sentence or one paragraph, some small amount on a consistent basis is better than sporadically doing a lot and then doing

nothing for the rest of the time. That would be my number one piece of guidance. Number two piece of guidance would be seek serendipitous inspiration. Find sources of joy and stimulation and creative inspiration wherever you can around the world, around us in nature and museums, among the people that we encounter in our daily lives. There are so many seeds of genius and ideas and creative different experiences and

different personalities and different skills and artistic capabilities and we don't always unlock that. We don't always draw the inspiration we can from those around us, from the places around us, the people around us, the museums around us, the world around us. If we look at the world through a lens of possibility and inspiration, we are more apt to discover things and draw stimulation and get inspiration

than if we look at the world through a lens of what I need to do right now, where I need to go right now, getting around all the people and things around me in order to get to a very specific destination. That's a kind of a mindset that I think is helpful in a world where there's so much going on that we often feel a need to block it all out and there's a tendency to try to block out as much of it as you can and focus on just what's

most useful to you. But doing so, I think, creates missed opportunity because everything around us has the potential to be a source of inspiration. Yeah, totally. Thank you for the inspiring advice. I really love the story of the lens of opportunity. See the things through a lens of opportunity. That's amazing. Last question.

Since grass is a platform where people share what they are reading and learning as their digital legacy, we want to ask you, what legacy or impact do you want to leave behind? Sorry, this is a big question. One thing I think that we leave behind is the legacy of the people that we've encountered and that we've connected with over time. I think we share a little bit of ourselves with the people we encounter in our lives.

We also share in a way, we pass along things that have been shared to us by our predecessors, our ancestors, or people we've known, or our teachers. I guess I'd like to think of my legacy as being someone who passes on things that I've gained from generations prior to me and leaving a small positive impact on people I've encountered, whether it's students. They're in different circles. Some people you just encounter once and you never see them again. You bump into them at a train station or something and have a short conversation.

Other people you have an hour-long conversation with or you meet once and have a longer interaction with. Then there are people you meet regularly but for a limited time. Then there are people you know throughout your life or for a long period of time. In each of those spheres, we can have differing levels of connection or contact or impact or influence. My hope would be or my aim would be that in some small way, at least some of those people, I would leave with a positive

impact in some way, whether that's helping them feel better about their own capabilities and feel more confident or feel more capable or helping them learn about something they didn't know about or be able to do something they couldn't do before or do it better than they could before or understand something or appreciate something or whether it's in some other way benefiting from the experience of our contact or connection.

I guess it could even be through writing. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I guess it could even be through writing, right? Through having read something. That's an even more distant realm of that circle, I guess, because there are people that you never meet in your whole life and you somehow, you know, maybe one thing you write helps them a tiny little bit or maybe something you write helps them, you know, more substantially or opens the door where they

meet someone else and then that helps them. So like through an indirect chain of consequences, you might help people indirectly. So I hope that's true as well, which I guess, yeah, I guess is a way of saying like, you know, leaving at least some people with some benefit from our contact, from our connection. Yeah, that's very beautiful and thank you. And thank you so much for taking time today.

Yeah, we really enjoyed the conversation and learned a lot from you and your experience. Thank you. Thanks for the conversation. Thanks for the opportunity to chat and to reflect on these things. And I appreciate the open approach to the questions and the conversation. And yeah, I appreciate the chance to share this time with you. Thank you.

Share This Audio Transcript & Summary 📚

How AI and Tools Are Transforming Journalism and Education by Jeremy Caplan

00:00

52:11