SimPPL
Programs · AI for Journalism

Training newsroom leaders and reporters to use AI responsibly.

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.

50+
newsroom leaders and reporters trained
4
annual training programmes across Germany, Mongolia, Kenya, and JournalismAI APAC
10+
curriculum modules co-designed with DW Akademie
1
Arbiter case study featured by JournalismAI (2025)
Where we have worked

Programmes co-designed with each newsroom.

Every engagement starts with the partner's editorial priorities, then layers in the curriculum to complement technological innovations for their newsroom.

Arbiter case study featured in the JournalismAI Training Program, 2025.
JournalismAI Training Program · 2025
2026

Instructor and coach across the 2026 JournalismAI programmes.

JournalismAI · Google News Initiative · LSE / Polis · Instructor (Skills Lab APAC) · Coach (Innovation Challenge)

JournalismAI, run by Polis at the London School of Economics and supported by the Google News Initiative, is the premier global training programme on responsible AI for newsrooms, with more than 18,000 journalists trained worldwide. SimPPL first collaborated with a JournalismAI-incubated team in 2022, and in 2026 Swapneel was invited to be an instructor for the APAC cohort of the Skills Lab and a technical mentor for half of the teams in the Innovation Challenge.

JournalismAI · Polis at LSE
AI in Newsrooms fellowship, Gem Suites, Riverside, Nairobi, October 2025.
Photo · DW Akademie / Africa Uncensored · Nairobi, October 2025
October 2025 – April 2026

Six-month AI in the Newsroom fellowship for Kenyan journalists.

Africa Uncensored & Odipodev · Nairobi, Kenya · Co-trainer, AI in the Newsroom fellowship

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
NEST Center for Journalism, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.
Photo · NEST Center for Journalism · Ulaanbaatar, 2024
2024 – 2025

Equipping Mongolian newsrooms to detect foreign influence operations.

NEST Center for Journalism · Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia · Trainer on Social Listening for civil society and media

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.

DW Akademie Global Media Forum, Berlin, 2025.
Photo · DW Akademie · Berlin Global Media Forum, 2025
2022 – 2025

AI literacy and disinformation training for DW staff and partners.

DW Akademie · Bonn and Berlin · Senior consultant, in-house training

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 Akademie
Curriculum

Building core AI competency in the newsroom.

Four pillars that build the core AI competencies every newsroom needs, then tuned to the partner's local platforms, languages, and editorial priorities.

01

AI foundations for newsrooms

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.

02

Prompt and context engineering

Best-practice patterns for crafting article-ready outputs with large language models, drawing on OpenAI and Anthropic playbooks and adapted to local newsroom workflows.

03

Automated data journalism

Hands-on sessions on digital narrative mining, fact-checking with LLMs, and using AI to extract a story from a CSV dataset.

04

Ethics, bias, and newsroom policy

Practical guidance on writing newsroom AI policies, understanding bias implications in foundation models, and refusing the AI use-cases that should not ship.

Newsroom and platform partners

Who we build this with.

Bring this to your newsroom

We co-design AI training programmes with newsroom partners worldwide.

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.

Get in touchAll programs