NotebookLM — recently renamed Gemini Notebook — does more than summarise documents. It can organise them into a coherent visual narrative, complete with titles, explanatory text, charts, diagrams and striking illustrations.
The process begins with the sources. A journalist can upload PDFs, Google Docs, webpages, photographs, YouTube videos, audio files or personal notes. NotebookLM studies this material and uses it as the factual foundation for the presentation. This is an important distinction: the system does not have to start from a vague prompt or from information gathered indiscriminately across the internet.
In the Studio panel, the user selects Slide Deck and provides a set of instructions. The prompt can specify the subject, audience, language, length and visual approach. A journalist might ask for “a ten-slide presentation explaining how facial recognition is used at airports, written for a general audience, with a sober editorial design and clear diagrams”.
NotebookLM then identifies the central points, decides how to distribute them across the slides and builds a logical sequence. It can transform a dense investigation into a visual journey: the opening question, the essential facts, the people involved, the figures, the consequences and the issues that remain unresolved.
The presentation is generated with Google’s image technology. The result can therefore be surprisingly elegant: maps, timelines, conceptual illustrations, data visualisations and magazine-style compositions are combined with concise text. Colours and graphic language can also be shaped through the prompt. The user may request, for example, the restrained appearance of a newspaper supplement or the brighter style of a technology magazine. Individual slides can subsequently be revised by asking the system to change their text, layout or visuals. Google explains how Slide Decks work.
For a journalist, however, the most interesting result may not be the presentation as a whole. Every slide is also a potential visual asset. A particularly effective illustration, diagram or timeline can be exported from the deck as an image and adapted to enrich an online article. NotebookLM can also create separate PNG, JPG or SVG files, while presentations may be downloaded in PowerPoint format. Google introduced these additional export formats in 2026.
In this way, the tool can help a newsroom build a richer visual collection around a story. One image may explain a technical process; another may summarise a sequence of events; a third may compare figures that would otherwise remain buried in the text. The article becomes easier to understand, especially on a smartphone, where a clear visual can often communicate more quickly than several paragraphs.
