With the help of Claude, I vibecoded an interactive summary function into existence.
At Frankfurt AI Forum, the newest event of the WAN-IFRA, the World Association of News Publishers, Financial Times’ Liz Lohn talked about their successful AI summaries and how they give users the impression of realtime generation.
I jumped at the opportunity to implement such a feature on my personal WordPress site. On the backend, WordPress fetches the content of the posting, or in the case of link postings it tries to crawl the destination, and sends it to Claude. Before publishing, I check the summary. On the frontend, a React component shows a small spinning wheel before displaying the cached summary.
I think it doesn’t give jittery election needle vibes but makes the user feel in control of the experience. Just like at the Financial Times.
What else did I take home from Frankfurt AI Forum?
- You can buy AI recognition resistant knitwear from Italian designer brand Cap_able. Not only did Laurens Vreekamp model his surveillance-avoiding sweater, he also let an AI drive his computer and do research on tis own. Eventually, it crashed. But it was his wake-up call that AI is advancing fast, and we all better adopt a vibe mentality and experiment.
- It’s crunch time. Many newsrooms are prototyping AI applications, for example newsletter drafts, translation, video categorization, editorial assistants, financial reports, content recommendations. How about digesting local event announcements and offer them not as a calendar, but as a chatbot? (Thanks, Stéphanie Barsch, Alexander Houben, Jan Dalk.)
- Meanwhile, Tobias Zwingmann urged publishers to enact a 10k rule and use AI to measurably drive value, be it weekly, monthly, or yearly. No fancy AI features without ROI. No productivity gains without impact.
- AI will be baked into editors, and Springer’s Content Analyzer already has prompts to proofread, translate, generate news from interviews, help with headlines, subheadlines, and call to actions, shorten or extend articles. Niloufar Behradi-Ohnacker talked about their AI ambassador program and how important it is to help employees adapt with learning that respects different needs and paces.
And much more. Alexandra Borchardt, Nico Wilfer, Sabine Wollrab, Margret Seeger, Sina Solveig Söhren, Ezra Eeman, Dr. Christoph Mayer and all attendees and colleagues. Thanks for inviting me at the event, Virginia Melero, Martin Froehlich and team! (This post is also on LinkedIn.)
