The Guild of Corporate Online Publishers (GOCOP) has organised a training session for its members on effectively deploying Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools as part of measures to help them publish faster, better, and more professionally to increase profitability.

The training comes on the sidelines of the Guild’s 10th Annual Conference, holding October 8-9, 2026, at the Radisson Blu Hotel, GRA, Ikeja, Lagos, with the theme: “2027 Elections: Trust, Transparency and Shared Responsibilities”.

The training session, which was anchored by an AI expert and publisher of The Lagos Times, Sulaimon Durojaiye with the title: “The AI-Powered Newsroom: AI & Prompt Engineering for Online Publishing”, explored how participants can publish faster, better and more profitably in the age of AI.

Durojaiye defined AI as technology that enables computers to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence. While observing that publishing has changed over time from its yesteryear structure of the newsroom-newspaper-reader, he noted that AI understand language, recognises patterns, analyses information, generates content, solves problems, makes predictions, assists decision-making, insisting that one does not need to be a programmer to use AI.

He listed three AI terms every publisher should know, comprising Generative AI, which creates text, images, audio, video and code. He also listed Large Language Models, which are systems trained on enormous amounts of information that understand and generate human language, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Copilot.

He also noted that AI Is not Google Search Engine, as it finds information for the user, returns links and sources, while you investigate and decide.

According to him, generative AI works with information, creates, transforms and analyses, but could be wrong many a time, a development that makes it incumbent on the user to verify every piece of information sourced from AI so as not to run into trouble.

He also took participants through the rudiments of what he described as ‘Enter Prompt Engineering’, which is the art and science of giving AI clear instructions to produce useful results.

He differentiated a Bad Prompt, which might involve a prompt like write a story about the budget, and a Better Prompt, which might just be like asking the AI to act as a senior Nigerian newspaper correspondent, who might be required to analyse the supplied budget speech, write a 600-word news story, lead with the most significant development in the budget speech, using the inverted pyramid format in news writing.

He further listed the Five-Part Prompt Formula comprising: Role, Task, Context, Requirements and Output, warning that better instructions would produce better results and vice versa.

On the AI Newsroom, he told participants that AI can be deployed for both news gathering and research, as it can analyse long speeches and reports, summarise government documents, extract key facts, compare documents, generate interview questions and also identify story angles.

Other newsroom and research capabilities of the AI include its ability to analyse datasets, research background information, convert complex materials into plain English and help to investigate, but it is warned that it does not replace investigation itself.

Other uses of the AI listed include its ability to assist across the publishing workflow comprising news gathering, research interviews, transcription, writing, editing and SEO social newsletter analytics, noting that it is not just one tool, but rather an entire workflow.

According to him, with the use of AI, one news event can become multiple content products. Including news stories, features and explainers, profiles and interviews, opinion drafts, headlines and captions, newsletters, press-release transformation, adding that while AI accelerates production, the journalist remains responsible for facts, context and news judgement.

Durojaiye also disclosed that AI could be used for SEO, which underscores the fact that one does not just need to publish, but to get found, noting that it could be used for search-friendly headlines, SEO titles and meta descriptions, keywords and search intent, FAQs, content structures, internal-link suggestions and content clusters

“The story isn’t finished when you publish it. It is finished when the right audience can find it”, he said.

•PHOTO, L-R: Publisher of The Lagos Times, Sulaimon Durojaiye, President of GOCOP, Danlami Nmodu, mni, Publisher, Sundiata Post, Dr. Max Amuchie and the Publisher, Quick News Africa, Dr, Monday Ashibogwu, after the training sessions for members on the first day of the GOCOP Annual Conference held in Lagos on Tuesday, October 7, 2026.

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