INMA today released 9 Newsrooms Put Gemini Notebook to Work, a report sharing findings from the INMA x Gemini Notebook programme — a three-month virtual lab in which news publishers tested how source-grounded generative AI could extend their journalism.

Run by INMA with Google’s Gemini Notebook team (the product formerly known as NotebookLM) from June through August 2026, the programme gave participants product training and office hours with a product manager in the Gemini 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: Daily Maverick (South Africa), Der Spiegel (Germany), Economedia/Dnevnik (Bulgaria), Funke (Germany), Le Devoir (Canada), Mediacorp (Singapore), Mediahuis Nederland (Netherlands), Nexstar Media Group (United States), 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. 

The report finds 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 will present their projects on stage Friday at INMA Media Tech & AI Week in San Francisco, alongside Gemini Notebook co-founder Steven Johnson. 

“The central lesson is one I keep returning to in product work: Start with the user and the outcome. The technology comes afterwards,” writes Jodie Hopperton, lead of INMA’s Product & Tech Initiative, in the report’s foreword.

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.
• 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.

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

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .