About Nina Cialone and Lehigh’s Newspaper
Nina Cialone is a senior studying cognitive science at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. In her downtime, Nina writes for Lehigh’s newspaper, The Brown and White, a publication so storied it dates back to the 19th century. Nina has also been covering AI for the publication Don’t Count Us Out Yet, published on Substack, which covers all things new technology.
This past semester, Craig Gordon, Nina’s mentor, gave her the task of a lifetime. Mr. Gordon challenged Nina to build an Artificial Intelligence agent trained on the entire archive of the Brown and White. This presented the prospect of bringing together Nina’s two passions, generative AI and journalism. As Nina embarked on this project, she began to realize an immense opportunity that could change the landscape of journalistic research for years to come.
Challenge
Nina and Craig aimed to create a no-code AI chatbot trained on over a century of newspaper content, more than 300 million words. The agent needed to support journalistic research, provide structured access to articles in multiple formats, and eventually include podcasts and multimedia. They were unsure if a solution existed that could handle the scale and complexity of the archive.
Solution
CustomGPT.ai enabled Nina to:
- Ingest large volumes of historical content using sitemap generation and crawling tools.
- Index and organize content from multiple formats (over 1400 supported).
- Customize the chatbot’s Persona and fine-tune it using beta tester feedback.
- Deploy the AI agent into digital platforms, including Slack, without writing any code.
“The specific tools to help create a sitemap were immensely helpful for us because of the way that our archive is set up. Instead of many hours of copying and pasting, all I had to do was just copy and paste the whole thing right into CustomGPT’s tool.”
Nina Cialone
Student Writer for The Brown and The White
Nina’s Results
- Indexed over 400 million words from The Brown and White newspaper archive.
- Began integrating podcast episodes and other multimedia into the dataset.
- Created a working AI chatbot in a no-code environment.
- Beta tested the agent with editors and advisors to refine accuracy.
- Prepared for deployment via Slack for editorial use.
Why it Worked
The success stemmed from a combination of CustomGPT’s powerful sitemap integration tools, support for numerous content formats, and a user-friendly, no-code interface. Nina was able to focus on curating content and shaping the agent’s Persona without needing technical expertise, making the platform ideal for education and journalism settings.
Conclusion
What started as a challenging proof-of-concept turned into a working solution that exceeded expectations. The AI agent, now trained on decades of content, is undergoing beta testing and will soon support research and editorial work for Lehigh’s student newspaper.
To read other Case Studies like this one, visit https://customgpt.ai/customers.
