Easy Custom Calendar Creation

After 15 years working as a newspaper editor at two dailies and three weeklies, and another 15 years working in tech and simultaneously as the managing editor of several regional magazines, I can attest one of the greatest bogs of boring tasks lay in the gathering and editing of listing-style information.

Print and digital publications are full of these things – community calendars, church calendars, new legal codes, municipal and government announcements. In the way-way back times, staff would spend several hours a day tracking that information down, or having to take dictation as city officials and community organizers called it in. We even had to transcribe it from postal mail and the occasional hand-written note dropped at the front desk.

The internet era has made this both easier and more difficult – easier because the information is just out there, but harder because all of the people and agencies who put it together no longer make any effort to get that to media outlets. On the rare occasion that they do, it's a mess.

Late last year, after spending four hours editing down a regional events calendar for one of our magazines, I finally sat down and built an automated editor that would handle that task … in about two minutes. It takes all of the raw, messy event listings given to us and outputs exactly what we need – everything consistent across all listings, following our style (Associated Press, in this case), spell-checking and generally editing it for errors and flagging any posts that need to be verified.

It worked stellarly right out of the gate, very little fine-tuning needed for consistent output. I had already been building out an AI-based set of editors' tools, and this dovetailed in there nicely.

Once the calendar editor was in good shape, it was time to tackle the biggest source of pain in the project. The reason the content was such a trainwreck was because the staff putting it together hated every minute of it. Not surprising – everyone who has done that kind of compiling for publications throughout history has hated it. It is the most boring part of the job. Like editing a phone book.

Next step, then: Create an automation that, given certain parameters, would go out and mine online resources for the information and compile it following the style guidelines we set up in the AI editor.

This proved to be much trickier than I expected – we were giving it lots of input variables – geofencing, timeframe, number of entries, and the like.

We also were looking for feature style events – nothing hard news. I needed to ignore city council meeting dates but needed to focus on a local venue hosting a band, art shows over high school athletic events; things like that. (Though we built in enough flexibility that the automation would be able to focus on those things, too, if that's what we needed). Teaching it to recognize quality content and then creating a prompt that would run in specific environments correctly every time turned out to be the biggest chunk of our work.

And AI, like humans, hallucinates and makes mistakes. So we built a third automation that existed to solely verify all the event content created by either of the first two. Getting this one dialed in on the pass/fail threshold was again a lot more work than I anticipated.

By the way, Agent mode for the win on the last two automations.

It was all well worth the effort – it shaved down about six hours of double-plus unfun work to about 20 minutes of letting the automations do their thing. Like all good automations, these worked because we were familiar with the boring task and knew exactly what the end goal was. And we did the boring task of manually verifying the first few runs.

To be clear, these are not things that will replace warm bodies in newsrooms. My former industry has paired down across the board to the most minimal of staff. Using those resources to put together a church calendar or government meetings schedule for publication is a huge waste. I know -- outside of my work with Unlock Strategy, I am still a journalist and editor. I have a bunch more automations I am building into my Editors' Toolbox, but ywill always want a human in the loop when it comes to this kind of data gathering.

Anyone who wants this calendar automation or any other tools from my Editors' Toolbox, reach out.