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Friday Deep-Dive
A quick note, since this is the first one.
Welcome to the first edition of "The Fourth Estate" newsletter. Here's what you'll get from me:
Tuesdays — the AI news that actually matters for community publishers, in plain language. No hype, no "10 tools that will change everything." Just what shipped, what it means for a paper like yours, and whether it's worth your Tuesday.
Fridays — a field-notes piece like this one. Something I tried at my desk this week — the prompt, the workflow, what worked, what didn't, what I'd do differently. The stuff I wish another publisher had told me before I figured it out the hard way.
I'm writing this from the desk, not the sidelines. If something here is useful, hit reply and tell me. If something's wrong, hit reply harder.
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Claude Skills: A simple way to stop repeating yourself
I was chatting with a guy this week who runs a small business — not in publishing, different industry entirely — and he was telling me how much time he spends every morning writing customer emails.
"I open ChatGPT, I paste in the same paragraph about how my business sounds, I describe the situation, and then I can finally get help drafting the reply. By the time I'm done explaining, I could've just written the email myself."
I told him there's a fix for this in Claude, and it takes about 30 minutes to set up. It's called a Skill — a reusable set of instructions Claude loads automatically whenever it's relevant. Build it once, never paste those instructions again.
Every minute you spend re-explaining yourself to an LLM is a minute you're not running your business. Skills compound — the small businesses that set them up this year will be moving twice as fast as the ones still pasting instructions into every chat.
Source →
Read the full post →
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Skills are a great place to start, and they'll cover most of what a small business needs from an LLM in a given week. But the deeper a task gets — running a community paper, applying decades of judgment calls, wrangling court records and stylebook overrides and source-checking on a deadline day — the more you need something built in instead of bolted on. That's the line where I started building Quadd.
Trevor Slette runs Quadd.ai — AI tools built for publishers.
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— Trevor
Trevor Slette
Co-founder, Quadd.ai · 25-year newspaper guy
trevors@quadd.ai
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P.S. P.S. Tuesday's brief lands at 7 a.m. — I'm leading with the AI announcement that's going to change how every paper handles photo cutlines. Watch your inbox.
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Turn PDFs into publishable copy.
Court records, box scores, honor rolls, fair results, meeting minutes — the documents that should not eat up an afternoon. Quadd's Document Intelligence learns your paper's exact layout, then turns the messy files into clean, copy-paste-ready text. Court reports we used to retype for an hour now take three minutes. Same number, every time.
See how Document Intelligence works →
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