Part 10: The First Newsletter, Halloween Edition

On September 29 I asked Claude to put together the first issue of "Digital Den: The Weekly," a Halloween edition. This one was strictly a draft. My instructions said plainly: read from Sanity, but don't change anything, don't create a campaign, and don't send a thing.

A detailed brief

I wrote a long brief covering how to pick the content, the voice, the section order, the look and a list of every deliverable I wanted back. The Halloween touch had firm limits: keep most of the normal brand, stay navy and blue, and use pumpkin orange only sparingly, with a few tiny bats and a fine spiderweb. No novelty fonts, no clip art, no cartoon pumpkins. Telling an AI what not to do is as important as telling it what to do.

Checking the facts, including our own

Claude pulled published content from Sanity and picked a lead story on freeing up phone storage, a second piece busting the "Macs don't get viruses" myth, and three tech news items. Every news headline, date and claim was checked against the original source. That caught something: one of our own news blurbs in Sanity said a new pair of smart glasses did note-taking, and the source article said no such thing. That detail was left out. Where our rewritten headlines differed from the publisher's, the publisher's wording was used.

Old-school layout, on purpose

Here's a fun one for longtime coders. Email is built the way web pages were in the late 1990s: HTML tables, styles written directly onto each element, and no scripts. Many email programs, Outlook especially, still don't support modern web layout. So the draft came back as a single 640-pixel column built from tables, with a plain-text version alongside it and previews of how it looks on a desktop and a phone.

Gaps reported, not papered over

My brief asked for any gap to be labeled clearly instead of faked, and two came up. The work area Claude uses couldn't load my logo or the Sanity images, so the previews showed labeled stand-ins, while the real email pointed at the real images. And the cover images in Sanity had no alt text, the description screen readers use for people who can't see the picture. Claude wrote alt text for the draft and flagged that it should be added in Sanity itself.

The lesson

A detailed brief with clear limits gets you a better result than a quick request. Say what's off limits, ask for every fact to be checked, and ask the AI to report gaps rather than fill them in.

Try it yourself

Next time you ask an AI for something that will go out under your name, end your request with: "If anything is missing or can't be verified, label it clearly instead of making it up." Then actually read the list of gaps it gives you.

Next time: real email sending, a Support button, and a home page redesign shaped by future readers.