Duc Tran uses Codex to turn newsroom work at Tech in Asia into internal tools for colleagues. In less than two years, his role expanded from Data Journalism Lead to include internal product building. “Title doesn’t matter for me,” he said. Helping his team and creating value for readers does.
One Codex-assisted project is a Tech in Asia article that tracks open roles at global AI companies in Singapore. A workflow refreshes the listings each week, then calculates which companies are hiring most. Duc gave Codex official documentation and built the automation around the newsroom’s existing services. The data work happens automatically, and he personally writes the article. Duc said engagement on that article has been much higher than average. That project led to a workspace built around Tech in Asia’s editorial team. After a journalist publishes an article, it displays a ready-to-share URL with that person’s tracking parameters so that they can post it to social media. Before, reporters copied links and names into a spreadsheet and used a Google form. Now, Duc said, colleagues no longer need to do that.
Another module replaces scattered company-tracking sheets with a central record of which journalist follows a company and what the newsroom has learned – centralizing knowledge like a customer relationship management tool, but for companies covered. The current tool is designed to protect institutional memory, but Duc is also exploring a relationship graph to help reporters find colleagues who already know a prospective source.
Another workflow sends each journalist their article’s page-view and subscription results in Slack the next day, replacing a search in Tableau. For yet another data product, Codex helped Duc extract figures from the financial-statement PDFs of a covered company, store them in a database, and refresh the associated article.
Because Tech in Asia is small and its engineers have many high-priority tasks, Duc said, a bespoke editorial tool might otherwise take months to deliver. Buying another system would ask journalists to reshape their work around unfamiliar software. With Codex, he can test and implement features in “days, not weeks,” fitting them to the newsroom’s routines. While he’s at it, he also has Codex to scan his code for possible security issues.
Duc studied mathematics in high school, business and economics at university, then worked in marketing and market research before moving into data journalism. Data journalism appealed to his curiosity and his desire to show readers a broader picture than a handful of interviews could provide. His basic programming background also taught him to recognize the kinds of repetitive work an algorithm might handle.
Duc’s approach is to ask how one journalist can improve the whole team, rather than simply hit individual targets. Codex gave him a way to turn editorial instincts into products for the whole newsroom.
