ONA Weekly #545: Play Session To Experiment With Sora

Play session to experiment with Sora

From time to time, we organize “mini labs” as low-stakes, play-driven opportunities to experiment with a specific AI tool. These sessions run for 45 minutes and are meant to be very hands-on. Save the date for the next one on Feb. 5 when we’ll practice generating videos and posting them online. We’ll try out prompts in Sora and build a prompt library for videos to continue testing and adapting.

AI mini-labs are open and free for anyone to attend, regardless of ONA membership. To support more learning opportunities like this year-round, consider becoming a member today.

People are typing…

Join the ONA Slack Community to connect with peers anytime about industry news and trends, feedback on a project, tool recommendations and more. What people are chatting about lately:

• How are you managing the logistics of buying and sharing AI tools as more people in  your newsroom gain knowledge and interest in using them?
• Tip sheets for covering science-related topics, especially for small local newsrooms
• Prepublication review by legal experts and other ways news organizations are shoring up against more media attacks during President Trump’s second administration
• Seeking examples of privacy policy and terms of service for a website update

Mark your calendar

• Jan. 30: Source tracking fosters responsive engagement and improves your journalism
• Feb. 5: Mini-Lab: AI Tools for Video Creation
• Feb. 11: AI Innovator Collaborative
• March 11: AI Innovator Collaborative
• March 19: Advanced Prompt Writing for AI 
• April 8: AI Innovator Collaborative
• April 9: Mini-Lab: Advanced Prompt Writing
• April 30: Advanced AI Data Journalism Tools
• May 13: AI Innovator Collaborative
• May 14: AI for Freelancers
• June 4: Mini-Lab: AI for Freelancers 
• June 10: AI Innovator Collaborative
• July 8: AI Innovator Collaborative
• Aug. 12: AI Innovator Collaborative
• Sept. 10-13: ONA25 in New Orleans 
• Oct. 14: AI Innovator Collaborative
• Nov. 11: AI Innovator Collaborative
• Dec. 9: AI Innovator Collaborative

Career opportunities

ONA’s Career Center is an excellent resource for jobs, fellowships and internships in digital journalism. Recent postings include:

• Director of Content and News Media, University of Pennsylvania NEW!
• Open-rank Career-track Professor (Broadcast and Video Reporting), Arizona State University NEW!
• Executive Editor, Anchorage Daily News LLC NEW!
• Open-rank Career-track Professor (Multimedia and Audience Engagement), Arizona State University NEW!
• Open-rank Career-track Professor (Digital Reporting and Editing), Arizona State University NEW!
• Editorial Intern 2025, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
• Assistant Professor in Journalism and Digital Media, California State University, Fullerton
• Development Director, States Newsroom
• Librarian for Journalism and Media, Culture and Communication, NYU Libraries
• Politics Editor, CalMatters
• Higher Ed Media Fellowship for Early-Mid Career Journalists, The Institute for Citizens & Scholars

What we’re watching in AI tech

• Apple pulls error-prone AI-generated news summaries in its beta iPhone software
• OpenAI to fund four new Axios Local newsrooms
• Google inks deal with The Associated Press to bring more real-time info to Gemini
• Key AI concepts to grasp in a new hybrid journalism era: transparency, autonomy, and authorship
• Rest of World reports on the global struggle over how to regulate AI

Elsewhere on our radar

• Press Briefing: Is insurance the next big climate story?, Covering Climate Now
• ​​MassLive Looks to High School Sports to Expand Digital Readership, Nieman Reports
• Hundreds of subreddits are considering banning all links to X, 404 Media