Who I am
Thirty years in newsrooms. Fourteen months building what comes next.
I spent thirty years in newsrooms — the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, the Star Tribune, where I became the first Chief Creative Officer in its 150-year history. Four Pulitzer teams, a $20 million pandemic-era turnaround, a thousand awards the rooms earned together. In 2024, the position was eliminated.
The résumé — thirty years, with the dates →
Since then I've spent fourteen months building a working practice with AI — films, a book, software, a method — every day, in public, at claudewill.io. AI as the way the work gets made, the method itself.
Here's the honest shape of it: the machine produces — drafts, builds, renders, searches. I judge — what's true, what the spine is, what to cut. Production isn't scarce anymore; judgment is, and judgment is the thirty years. The collaboration is the practice itself.
The work
A film made entirely from a terminal.
LIGHTNING/bug — a 5:47 film about two kinds of light, the lightning and the firefly. Generated frames, API calls, ffmpeg. No camera, no crew, no set. The first film from sssstudios, finished as a Mother's Day release in 2026.
Film: vimeo.com/sssstudios/lightning-bug
It's the same working method behind everything here, pointed at a film instead of a page. Before any of that, there was print: I art directed the Star Tribune's Prince commemorative — "Purple Majesty," sixteen pages, four zoned covers, two original paintings commissioned in a week. Reprints still sell a decade later. Same instincts, different terminal.
The name
Claude William Simmons, 1903–1967.
Oklahoma farmer. Builder. Patriarch. Born in Oklahoma Territory before it was a state. Raised his family through the Depression. Fixed what was broken, built what was needed, helped whoever showed up. Never wrote any of it down.
The practice carries his name because it carries his instinct: show up, do the work, tell the truth, help the person in front of you. Claude is also my middle name. The asterisk in derek*claude is where the two meet.
The method travels
It isn't bound to this one site.
The practice runs in more than one place. Hancock is an AI storyteller — one of the first of its kind — with its own domain, newsletter, and submission form, edited weekly. An institution saw it and wanted its own version; that became a working demo for the Public Alliance of Professional Journalists. A regional newsroom put the method into a print magazine. The writing carries too — Being Claude and the book.
It travels across machines, not just sites. The coaching engine behind Option D is model-agnostic — one prompt, nine different AI models, the same result. The method is the methodology, and the methodology runs on whatever's underneath. That's the whole point: the practice isn't a product, and it isn't bound to one tool.
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