La Diaria: Núbel, a weather-alert article generator
A two-week sprint halved a daily chore — then the tool quietly stopped when the person who drove it changed sections.
- Which routine tasks are worth automating?
- What can a two-week build deliver?
- What keeps a working tool running?
Problem
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 manual. Journalists essentially reprinted the press release, with "no soul" and no added journalistic value. A bad-weather stretch could mean doing it every morning for two weeks. The web team explicitly asked for help.
Solution
Núbel takes the institute's PDF, extracts the information, and rewrites it as an article in La Diaria's house style, learned from the paper's own past forecast articles. A journalist checks every figure before publication, including wind speeds, rainfall amounts and the departments affected. The tool was built in a roughly two-week sprint using Google AI Studio, an environment for building AI prototypes. The only additional work was wrapping it in a web interface.
Results
The tool cut the task by half. Producing an alert article went from about 20 minutes before Núbel to 10 minutes including supervision. By mid-2026 the tool was not running, even though the need remains.
Insights
The staff member who drove it moved to the radio section, and no meeting or routine exists to check whether the newsroom's tools still work. "We need to ensure that we maintain these tools." Without an institutional owner, even a successful build can quietly stop. Adoption was immediate because the tool answered a need the affected team had voiced themselves.
Cost
A two-week sprint by the participants, with no internal IT time.
Replicability
The ingredients are a structured official bulletin in a consistent format, a set of the newsroom's own past articles to teach the style, and a named person to verify the figures on every output. La Diaria needed no internal IT and built it in two weeks in a free environment.