How do I use ChatGPT deep research to find content for a local newsletter?

Deep research is good at the hardest part of a local newsletter to source: places around you that nobody on your team knows about yet. News is easy to get from feeds. Restaurants and local businesses are harder, especially for a helper who doesn't live there.

What prompt do I use?

I tell AI to write the prompt for me. Something like: I write a local newsletter in these areas, create me a hyper-detailed prompt specifically for deep research. Then I spell out what I want back:

• The area. The exact towns you cover.
• A default date window. If I don't put in a date, use the coming Thursday to Wednesday from today's date.
• The counts. The five most interesting news stories, five restaurants and three local businesses.
• The format. A two or three sentence summary of each, in a smart brevity or Morning Brew style.

You're probably still going to have to redo it after that. But it gets you pretty close.

Where do I keep the prompt?

In a doc. I don't think you can really save a deep research prompt inside a custom GPT. I keep it in a document, and when it's time: copy, paste, see what happens.

Why does it help most with restaurants?

"they've already been doing this for, you know, eight months. We kind of like running out of restaurants, right?"

Someone working on your newsletter from overseas doesn't know what restaurants are around. After about eight months, my team was running low. Deep research keeps turning up new ones, and the same goes for local businesses.

Once I have a place, I give AI the link and ask for two things in one go: a three to four sentence summary for the newsletter, to get people interested, and a five-paragraph in-depth article for the website. It writes both in one shot from just the link. The annoying part is moving them around: copy the short version into the newsletter post, start a new website post, go back for the full article, paste that in. It's a bunch of steps. I pay for both Claude and ChatGPT because they have different capabilities.

Can it find events too?

It's a great place to start, not a complete list. It's not going to find everything. My team uses ChatGPT and Perplexity for events, with the same rule: don't ask the LLM for events directly. Ask it to write a prompt that finds events within the last seven days, in these zip codes or cities, with everything you want laid out in detail. Then run that prompt in Perplexity. Try Gemini too, since Google owns it. More on sourcing in how to find enough local content every week.

Can deep research map my local competitors?

Yes, and that's what I do. Click the deep research box and type something like: I'm going to start a local newsletter in my area, these are the cities I live in, research any competitors that have magazines, email newsletters, websites or anything else that could be considered local media, and give me the link and all the details you know about each one. It comes back with a big list. Do a Google search too, just in case, but start with deep research.