The learnings of nine newsrooms introduced to Google’s Gemini Notebook are related in a new INMA report.

During a three-month virtual lab earlier this year, news publishers tested how source-grounded generative AI could extend their journalism. The programme was run by INMA with Google’s Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM) team, giving participants product training and office hours with a product manager in the Notebook team.

Each publisher built and published a public Notebook using its own journalism, archives, public documents, video, and audio – and fed its findings, limitations, and product requests back to the team.

The nine participants were selected for variety across geography, language, source format, audience need, and newsroom size, and included Daily Maverick (South Africa), Der Spiegel (Germany), Economedia/Dnevnik (Bulgaria), Funke (Germany), Le Devoir (Canada), Mediacorp (Singapore), Mediahuis Nederland (Netherlands), Nexstar Media Group (USA), and The Republic (Nigeria).

Their projects ranged from an election guide for Berlin and a civic knowledge tool in Nigeria, to an archive of Quebec sovereignty coverage, a “living library” of more than a decade of Singaporean current affairs video, a guide for residents navigating gas-extraction damage claims in the northern Netherlands, and an interactive experience marking the centenary of Route 66.

INMA product & tech initiative lead Jodie Hopperton (pictured) says the central lesson – and “one I keep returning to in product work” – was to start with the user and the outcome: “The technology comes afterwards”.

The report found the strongest projects started with a sharply defined audience outcome rather than the technology.

Among the cohort’s many transferable discoveries, Daily Maverick duplicated one election source base into three separate notebooks – a reader Q&A, an internal research and fact-checking tool for journalists, and a workspace for producing visual material – with shared sources but different instructions for each.

Daily Maverick and Mediacorp presented their projects on stage yesterday (Friday) during INMA’s Media Tech & AI Week, alongside Gemini Notebook co-founder Steven Johnson.

The report distils five lessons for publishers working with Gemini Notebook:

-start with the person and the outcome, not the archive or the technology;

-treat source organisation as product architecture: clean, name, tag, and catalogue before uploading;

-treat the prompt as an editorial product specification, not a single clever question;

-use different notebooks or instruction sets for different audiences, depths, and tasks; and

-‘Red-team’ everything – difficult questions reveal weak answers, weak sources, and sometimes gaps in the journalism itself.

Drawing on detailed case studies from each participant, the report covers what teams tried, what worked, what changed, and what they would do differently next time – along with the many ways the cohort put Gemini Notebook to use, from editorial research and service journalism to archive discovery and rapid product prototyping.

‘Nine Newsrooms Put Gemini Notebook to Work’ is available free to INMA members and for purchase by non-members.

Now based in Los Angeles, Hopperton is a British media executive whose career has featured corporate roles, technology start-ups, moderating events, authoring, and speaking at news industry events. She is a former interactive manager for Trinity Mirror, director of syndication and licensing for the New York Times, and a consultant to media and tech start-ups focussed on video distribution, VR, and audio tech. Before INMA, she worked with the Global Editors Network and WAN-Ifra.