Jaemark Tordecilla is using Codex to help journalists cover a complex trial marked by marathon courtroom sessions, dozens of speakers, and testimony in multiple languages.
Daily coverage of the impeachment trial of Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte captures quotes and newsworthy moments. But Tordecilla, a journalist and technologist who spent nine years leading a major Manila newsroom, says reporters struggle to keep track of how weeks of testimony and evidence fit together.
Using Codex, Tordecilla built Working Draft. It identifies each speaker in the transcript of that day’s session and adds timestamps that take journalists to the corresponding moment in the Senate video.
Working Draft also summarizes each day’s entire session rather than only the most newsworthy moments. It lists the witnesses and documents discussed and produces an audio summary. Journalists can return to the video to check its work.
He studied computer science and earned a master’s degree in technology management before moving into journalism. He was a 2023–24 Nieman Fellow at Harvard and is now Fathm’s Regional Director for Asia Pacific, working on the AI Futures Lab at WAN-IFRA, an international association of news publishers. The program is supported by OpenAI.
The name signals how Working Draft should be used: as material to check before publication. It is most useful between sessions, when reporters need to revisit testimony, find a document, or catch up on a day they missed.
Tordecilla put the tool together in his spare time. It took roughly a day to build a working site for the first day’s proceedings and roughly a week to catch up on a month-long backlog. He can now process a new session and update the site in about three hours, with the last hour spent checking the material himself. “I am the bottleneck,” he jokes.
Working Draft is one of several public-interest journalism tools Tordecilla has built. He used AI coding tools to turn the Philippines’ 2025 national health survey into a dashboard with maps, charts, and plain-language summaries checked against the original data.
Tordecilla is now working with Rappler, an independent news organization co-founded by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa, on a project that uses Codex and ChatGPT to search roughly 18,000 local-government audit reports and help journalists find potential stories. He also sees potential for Working Draft-style tools to help reporters cover legislative and budget hearings, where important changes to public spending can be buried inside hours of proceedings.
For Tordecilla, the opportunity lies in combining technical capacity with newsroom judgment: knowing what matters, what needs checking, and what will help reporters. Codex lets him use that combination at a scale that once required a technical team. As Tordecilla puts it, “Everything just becomes data.”
