SimPPL designs and runs AI capacity-building programmes for newsroom partners worldwide: the Google News Initiative's JournalismAI, DW Akademie, the NEST Center for Journalism in Mongolia, and Africa Uncensored / Odipodev in Nairobi. Arbiter was featured as a JournalismAI case study in 2025.
Every engagement starts with the partner's editorial priorities, then layers in the curriculum to complement technological innovations for their newsroom.
Co-led with Steffen Leidel and Lynn Khellaf (both DW Akademie), and hosted on the ground with Africa Uncensored and Odipodev. Each fellow develops an AI project for their newsroom over the course of the programme.
Recap on LinkedIn
A two-day Social Listening curriculum for Mongolian newsrooms and civil-society partners convened by the NEST Center. We cover detecting state-backed influence operations, hands-on platform data collection, and using AI to flag hateful speech. Funded through DW Akademie.
Several consulting engagements since 2022 with DW Akademie, the German public broadcaster's media-development arm. The work has paired a commissioned report on practical newsroom AI with multi-day workshops on detecting and monitoring disinformation across platforms, plus an organisational-needs assessment that shaped DW Akademie's downstream programming in Africa and Asia.
Who captures the value journalists create? · DW AkademieFour pillars that build the core AI competencies every newsroom needs, then tuned to the partner's local platforms, languages, and editorial priorities.
Plain-language explainers of machine learning, NLP, transformers, and reinforcement learning, framed around what journalists actually need to decide when to use AI and when to flag it.
Best-practice patterns for crafting article-ready outputs with large language models, drawing on OpenAI and Anthropic playbooks and adapted to local newsroom workflows.
Hands-on sessions on digital narrative mining, fact-checking with LLMs, and using AI to extract a story from a CSV dataset.
Practical guidance on writing newsroom AI policies, understanding bias implications in foundation models, and refusing the AI use-cases that should not ship.
If you lead a newsroom, a CSO, or a public broadcaster and want a tailored AI training programme, drop us a note. We bring programmes at the cutting edge of AI and pair them with hands-on investigative reporting using Arbiter, so journalists and civil-society partners learn the platform while they use it.
