La Diaria: Núbel, a weather-alert article generator
A two-week sprint that halved a daily chore — and quietly stopped running when its owner moved desks.
Problem statement
Every red, orange or yellow weather alert issued by Uruguay's meteorology institute arrives each morning as a PDF, and La Diaria's web team had to turn each one into an article. The work was purely mechanical — journalists essentially reprinted the press release, with "no soul in that article" and no added journalistic value — yet each one took meaningful time, and a bad-weather stretch could mean doing it every morning for two weeks. The web team explicitly asked for help.
The solution
Núbel was built in a roughly two-week rapid sprint around October 2025, coached under a Google News Initiative programme. The team used Google AI Studio (a free Google environment for building AI prototypes) to create the tool; the only additional work was wrapping it in a web interface journalists could use. The internal IT team was not involved at all. The method is simple: the tool extracts the information from the institute's PDF and rewrites it in La Diaria's house style, having been given around ten of the paper's own past forecast articles as examples. Human supervision is built in as the final step — a web journalist checks every figure before publication: wind speeds, rainfall amounts, the departments affected.
Results
The tool delivered substantial time savings, though the two records of how much differ and the difference is unresolved: in the interview, producing an alert article went from about 15 minutes to under 5 including supervision; in a later written follow-up, the three web journalists put it at 20–25 minutes before Núbel and 10 minutes after. Either way, the task shrank by half or more, every day it recurred. The most notable alerts were published within ten minutes of work, and the newsroom's own summary of the benefit is exact: faster no-added-content articles that keep the paper's style. The interviewee's verdict was that the tool "worked perfectly" — and because it answered a need the affected team had voiced themselves, adoption was immediate.
CONTRADICTION FLAG — carried from extraction: transcript (15 min → <5) vs written follow-up (20–25 min → 10); presented side by side, not resolved.Insights
One to three web journalists used Núbel in practice. Its afterlife carries the harder lesson: by mid-2026 the tool was not running, even though the need remains — in the newsroom's words, "we need to ensure that we maintain these tools." The staff member who drove it moved to the radio section and lost visibility, and no meeting or routine exists to check whether the newsroom's tools are still working. A prototype that works is not yet a tool that lasts; without an institutional owner, even a successful build can quietly stop.
Cost
The indirect cost was a two-week sprint by the participants, with no internal IT time consumed.
Replicability potential
The pattern is one of the most followable in this casebook: a structured official bulletin in a consistent format, extraction, a house-style rewrite learned from roughly ten example articles, and a mandatory human check of every number. The technical barrier is low — La Diaria needed no internal IT and built it in two weeks inside a free prototyping environment. A newsroom wanting to follow the path needs three things: a source institution that publishes alerts in a consistent format, a set of its own past articles to teach the style, and a named person to verify the figures on every output. The maintenance gap is the fourth, less obvious requirement: decide who owns the tool after the sprint ends.