Tool for journalists: Story SpinnerAI, for generating story angles based on user needs

A search result in Story SpinnerAI prompting it to identify user needs and offer new story ideas

What is it?

A custom ChatGPT bot that generates topic ideas based on the user needs model.

NB: The chatbot is based on the older BBC user needs model with six user needs (prior to it being expanded to eight user needs with smartocto), and the similar DPA DRIVE model.

Cost: Free (does not require the ChatGPT Plus subscription plan), with limited prompts that reset every three hours. Sign up required to ChatGPT.

How is it of use to journalists?

User needs strategies are growing in popularity as a way to align news content to audiences wants and needs.

Journalists can use the chatbot to simply paste in a topic they want to cover, and the chatbot will suggest how to cover it appealing to all six user needs (update me, help me, educate me, give me perspective, inspire me and divert me).

For instance, this is a search result simply pasting in "England lose European championship final", showing just two of the six user needs.

However, the chatbot is also capable of recognising user needs from existing news stories. This is helpful for confirming whether a piece that has been written or commissioned correctly meets the user need in mind.

The chatbot can then suggest ways to rewrite, or do a follow-up news story, with a different user need in mind.

A response from the search query: "how could I do a follow up story on this with an 'educate me' user need?"

The creator Simon Kremer, editor of Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA), said: "The prompt itself is very simple to give examples for each of the dimensions of the user needs model. Since I also used the GPT creator assistant it was kind of an iterative process with lots of trial and error.

"[The idea is to] show you different angles on one topic. So you can try to write different stories for different user needs. Or chose one when you want to engage people, for example."

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