NewsroomSim
A customisable, AI-powered newsroom simulation for journalism education, designed to help students practise editorial decision-making in dynamic global news environments.
Developed by Dani Madrid-Morales, NewsroomSim brings together a realistic newswire feed, a social media aggregator and instant messaging with correspondents in a single teaching environment.
The platform remains under active development, and access is currently shared selectively with educators, collaborators and institutions interested in testing or using it.
What the platform offers
NewsroomSim is designed to support practical teaching around news judgement, verification, prioritisation, workflow management and the principles that shape editorial choices in contemporary newsrooms.
Customisable simulation environment
The platform can be configured for different teaching scenarios, allowing educators to vary regions, story arcs, editorial pressures, formats and classroom activities.
AI-powered newsroom dynamics
AI features help simulate correspondence, evolving story development and information flows, making the learning experience more interactive and responsive.
Ideal for journalism education
It is especially suited to modules and workshops that teach editorial decision-making, helping students understand how journalists assess, prioritise and develop stories under pressure.
Based on newsroom research
The overall design draws on research into how editorial decisions are made in global newsrooms, connecting classroom practice to real professional routines and constraints.
Three core areas
The simulation is organised around three core environments that expose students to different layers of editorial decision-making: incoming wires, social signal monitoring, and correspondent interaction.
Newswire feed
The newswire feed can be customised to control which stories or topics appear, when stories are released, and which news agencies are included. All content is copyright-free because it is synthetically generated with an LLM within agreed parameters that control the level of complexity of the simulation.
Social media aggregator
The social media aggregator can be customised around specific platforms. It populates content in real time with synthetically generated posts that act as background noise, alongside relevant posts that can be curated for each teaching experience.
Instant Messaging with Correspondents
This feature is powered by Gemini and works with a controlled knowledge base that limits responses to the actual content of the simulation, helping students interact with correspondents without introducing irrelevant or inconsistent information.
About the project
NewsroomSim was developed by Dani Madrid-Morales as a research-informed teaching tool for journalism education. It is designed to help students understand not just what appears in the news, but how editorial decisions are made, negotiated and prioritised.
Built on WordPress, the platform is relatively easy to customise and can be adapted to different newsroom scenarios, levels of study and teaching objectives.
It is particularly useful for courses that want to teach editorial judgement, global news awareness, verification, story development and collaborative newsroom workflows in a practical way.
If you would like to explore NewsroomSim for teaching, collaboration or pilot use, please get in touch at d.madrid-morales@sheffield.ac.uk.
Access is currently shared on a limited basis while features and workflows continue to be refined, but the project is open to conversations with interested educators and partners.