The automation that runs quietly behind every Urban News post

Somewhere between writing scripts and hosting live, I got tired of watching good stories die in the gap between broadcast and social. A segment would air, land well, and then sit there while someone tried to remember to clip it, caption it and post it hours later, once the moment had already passed.

So I taught myself to build the pipeline that closes that gap. Not because I set out to become a developer, but because nobody else was going to fix the specific problem I kept watching happen in our own newsroom. I learned it the way I learn most things: by needing it to work by a deadline.

Now, when a story airs on Urban News, it moves to social automatically, formatted for the platform, with nobody re-typing a caption at midnight. The system watches for what just aired, pulls the right clip, and pushes it out while the story is still the story people are talking about.

It is a small piece of engineering, but it buys the newsroom back hours every week to spend on the parts of the job that actually need a human: the interview, the follow-up question, the editorial judgment about what matters. A machine can move a file. It cannot decide what is true.

I do not think of myself as a developer. I think of myself as a journalist who got tired of a broken workflow and refused to wait for someone else to fix it.