How a B2B newsroom automated the busywork and kept its editor in charge
D2 Emerge, publisher of SD Times and ITOps Times, built two tools that hand the newsroom's routine work to AI and leave every decision with a person. The Editorial Cockpit sorts and ranks the flood of PR pitches. An editorial assistant inside WordPress drafts stories, images, SEO and social posts, and builds the newsletter. Nothing publishes or sends without an editor's approval. On SD Times, the tools save the editors about 2.5 hours of busywork a day, time that now goes into more stories, interviews and podcasts.
The situation
D2 Emerge runs two trade publications with a small editorial team. The editor's inbox takes in a steady stream of press releases, interview offers and contributed article pitches, most of them off-topic or spam. Each story that does run also has to be cleaned up, formatted, tagged, illustrated, optimized for search, shared on social and packaged into a newsletter.
None of that takes editorial judgment, but all of it takes time, and on a small team that time comes out of reporting and editing. The goal was to give it back without letting software decide what the publication says.
What we built
The two tools split the work along one line: software sorts, drafts and packages, and the editor decides. Each AI step ends in a choice a person makes.
The Cockpit and the assistant connect directly. A pitch the editor picks in the Cockpit hands off to WordPress with its source attached, ready to draft.
The Editorial Cockpit: an inbox that sorts itself
Every 15 minutes, the Cockpit reads the editor's inbox and has AI classify each new message as a press release, interview offer, article pitch or other. It names the company, writes a one-sentence summary and judges fit against the publication's beats.
- Ranked, not just filtered. Pitches score higher when they come from target companies, SD Times 100 honorees or preferred PR firms, or fit the beats closely.
- Junk handled. Spam, newsletters and pitches from blocked firms are archived automatically.
- One working queue. The editor sees press releases, interviews and articles in separate tabs, marks what's worth covering and moves it to an Editorial Desk queue.
- Replies drafted, never sent. For interview and article pitches, Interested or Pass writes a personalized reply as a Gmail draft. The Cockpit has no ability to send email at all.
The editorial assistant: the chores of publishing, inside WordPress
A Newsroom panel in the WordPress editor handles the work around each story. Every feature can be switched on or off, and every suggestion can be approved, edited or dismissed.
- Drafting. Imports a press release by URL, strips PR boilerplate, cleans up pasted formatting and writes it as a news story in the house style, with several headlines to pick from. A revise box takes plain directions like "trim the third paragraph."
- Accuracy checks. Flags unverified claims and quotes, unsourced assertions and facts that may have gone stale, and suggests what kind of source would back them up.
- Search and AI visibility. Suggests FAQ blocks with schema, buyer-language headlines, meta descriptions, stronger intros, tags, alt text, internal links and broken links.
- Images and social. Generates three featured image options, and drafts LinkedIn and X posts that go out through Buffer on publish, only for posts the editor approves.
- Newsletters. The editor picks the stories, and the assistant builds the full edition with sponsor blocks and pushes it into Mautic as a draft for review. It never sends on its own.
Both tools work alongside software D2 Emerge already used, including WordPress, Yoast, Co-Authors Plus, Buffer, Gmail and Mautic, and run on free tiers otherwise. The only new cost is about $15 a month in AI usage.
Results
The tools save SD Times' editors about 2.5 hours of busywork a day, more than 12 hours a week. That time didn't disappear into savings. It went back into journalism: more stories posted, more interviews and more podcasts.
What it means for you
AI in a newsroom works best when it does the chores and people do the journalism. If your editors spend their afternoons posting, tagging and assembling newsletters, that's the part to automate, with a clear handoff wherever judgment matters.
We map your workflow, decide with you where people stay in the loop and build the automation around it as a fixed-price project.