The “NPR Reporter” Prompt

I worked at NPR for three years. It was an amazing place to work.

If you are wondering, yes, they managed and built a culture that matches their on-air persona; honest, transparent and just. Hell, the have an ombudsman on staff for accountablity in reporting! (google it)

After I left NPR, I worked as a founder at a genetics startup. Which is funny, because I knew basically nothing about genetics.

In 2019, we attended a genetics conference in San Diego. I might have been the only non-scientist in the entire conference hall. I have my master’s in Geology, but that does not help much in sessions about cell aberrations and DNA extraction. I was a fish out of water.

So I did what a scrappy founder does: I talked my way into a genetics session. Then I talked my way onto the vendor showroom floor even though I didn’t have the money for a ticket. We were still one year away from our first revenue at Meenta, so we were running super lean.

And once I was in, I ran a simple play.

I walked booth to booth, chatting with every hardware vendor I could find, and I asked the same question every time:

“Can you explain your tech to me as if I were an NPR reporter?”

That one phrase changed everything.

The answers got calmer. Clearer. More narrative. Less jargon-by-default. They stopped selling and started explaining. They gave me context. They made tradeoffs legible. They told stories that a human could actually follow.

I wasn’t asking for “dumbed down.” I was asking for “well translated.”

Since then I have used this same approach over and over. I (imagine) I can see the stress leaving the expert when they hear this simple prompt. They know how to connect. This simple set of words dials down the challenges running through the speaker’s mind.

Side Context: My co-founder was the science side of the team. He was the biology SME. He had 20 years of pharma and biotech sales. I was the translator. He knew the science and the tech; I knew how to ask for the story. He was dumbfounded: ‘How did you get into the vendor room—and why are you in there?’

Fast forward to now: I do the exact same thing with AI.

There’s something magical about the words “NPR reporter.” It sets a frame that’s both intelligent and accessible. It quietly forces structure: a human-readable narrative, plain language, gentle pacing, grounded examples, and a bias toward clarity over flexing.

(Next time I am at a conference in the UK, I need to try out “like a BBC One reporter” and see if it works.)

And this is the part I don’t want anyone to miss:

This worked before AI.

The breakthrough wasn’t the tool. It was the prompt.

The best “prompt engineering” isn’t about clever tokens. It’s about choosing the right role, audience, and format so the explanation lands. With humans or machines, context is the multiplier.

So yes—thank you, Terry Gross, Guy Raz, and Ira Glass, and every other storyteller who taught me that the fastest path to understanding isn’t more information.

If you try this with your team—or with AI—and realize most people think they understand your system but can’t actually explain it clearly, you’re not alone.

The “NPR reporter” prompt is a simple way to expose that.

But once you see it, you start to notice how much is unclear.

I’m running a few 15-min Tech Stack Clarity Checks this month to help founders quickly see where their system is unclear, fragile, or hard to explain. This approach is part of my framework—part of how I help teams get perspective on tech and processes they thought they already owned.

Book Time

Fast forward to now: I do the exact same thing with AI.

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