Author: Oriol Salvador

Designing content around audience needs is one of the most reliable ways to create stories that work across platforms, build loyalty and reach people who may not yet be familiar with your work.

This goes beyond questions about format or platform.

It asks content producers to understand what people are trying to accomplish when they open an article, watch a video or search for context on a topic that affects their lives.

When you identify those needs early, every editorial and production choice has a purpose and you gain a clearer sense of what the audience is looking for, what the story must deliver and how it should live across platforms.

We are bombarded with notifications, social media snippets, and breaking headlines. The 24/7 news cycle can feel overwhelming.

Without context, news feels like noise, facts float in isolation, and stories lose meaning. Clear background and framing show audiences why events matter and how they connect to their lives.

It is what makes audiences understand, remember, and care.

Social media was meant to be a space for people to connect, share ideas, build communities, and participate in public life, a digital agora.

But what once brought us closer is now being overrun by automation.

Instead of amplifying real voices, algorithms are increasingly pushing artificial interaction.

If you have been on social media lately consuming content originally produced in languages other than your own, you’re familiar with the push for dubbed audio, produced using artificial intelligence (AI). This is not a minor shift.

Meta and YouTube are doubling down on AI translation features that aim to increase reach and attract a broader audience.

And while their goal is similar, they have made design choices to implement this technology that produce very different outcomes.

On Jan. 19 2025, TikTok was banned in the United States for a few hours.*

The latest resolution from the U.S. Supreme Court, issued on Jan. 17, made it “unlawful for companies in the United States to provide services to distribute, maintain or update the social media platform TikTok, unless U.S. operation of the platform is severed from Chinese control.”

The internet did what it does best, and many U.S.-based TikTok users protest the ban by moving to the app 小红书国际版 (“Xiaohongshu”), also known as REDnote. Ironically, this app is entirely Chinese-owned and operated from mainland China, unlike TikTok.

This digital migration sparkled both an unexpected cultural and language exchange and raised concerns about freedom of speech on the new platform.

If you struggled to keep track of everything happening, this TikTok ban is just the latest shakeup in the ever-evolving—and let’s face it, exhausting—social media landscape.

It has been about a year since my views on using AI as a journalist were transformed after a 3-day course at Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

Since then, I’ve integrated AI-powered virtual assistants like ChatGPT into various aspects of my personal and professional life, from revising and editing pieces of writing to assisting with my French learning or generating sets of keywords for tags on YouTube videos based on a given title and description.

One aspect of using ChatGPT that I don’t think is discussed enough is how much it can help as a writing assistant, particularly when working in languages that are not your mother tongue. In my experience, this is especially true for English (et un peu de français, aussi).