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Newsroom Robots
Nikita Roy
80 episodes
4 days ago
Looking to explore the intersection of AI and journalism? Influential thought leaders in the industry join data scientist and media entrepreneur, Nikita Roy, each week to explore what's next with AI and its implications for the media landscape. In each episode, industry experts discuss how automated newsrooms have the potential to change journalism and uncover opportunities to optimize workflows and increase efficiency without compromising journalistic integrity.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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All content for Newsroom Robots is the property of Nikita Roy and is served directly from their servers with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.
Looking to explore the intersection of AI and journalism? Influential thought leaders in the industry join data scientist and media entrepreneur, Nikita Roy, each week to explore what's next with AI and its implications for the media landscape. In each episode, industry experts discuss how automated newsrooms have the potential to change journalism and uncover opportunities to optimize workflows and increase efficiency without compromising journalistic integrity.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Tech News
Episodes (20/80)
Newsroom Robots
Francesco Marconi & Scott Austin: 2025 Year in Review, What Actually Changed in AI and Media

2025 wasn’t just another year of AI experimentation in the media industry. It forced the industry to confront a bigger question: what happens when AI stops being just a newsroom tool and becomes the layer audiences experience journalism through? That is the core question heading into 2026.



This week on Newsroom Robots, host Nikita Roy sits down with Francesco Marconi and Scott Austin for an end of year recap roundtable on what actually changed in AI and media in 2025 and what newsroom leaders need to prepare for heading into 2026.



Francesco is the co-founder and CEO of AppliedXL. He previously led R&D at The Wall Street Journal and built some of the earliest AI and newsroom automation systems at The Associated Press.



Scott leads business development at Symbolic.ai, an AI assisted publishing tool. He is also a journalist and digital media veteran who spent years at The Wall Street Journal as a reporter and award winning editor, and later led content partnerships at Dow Jones across major platforms.



This episode covers:


03:10 — Why 2025 was journalism’s operational reckoning year



08:55 — The shift from search to answers and why it breaks old business models



14:40 — Proactive AI and what ChatGPT Pulse reveals about the next distribution layer



20:30 — Journalism’s hidden work and why persistence, source building, and human judgment still matter



23:30 — Why news orgs must move upstream from content to structured knowledge



36:10 — AI agents: what they actually are, what they are not, and why transparency matters



41:20 — The overlooked shift: Model Context Protocol (MCP) and why it is a major newsroom disruption



51:05 — Predictions for 2026



Sign up for the Newsroom Robots newsletter for episode summaries and insights from host Nikita Roy.


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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4 days ago
1 hour 12 minutes 23 seconds

Newsroom Robots
Jim Friedlich, David Chivers & Matt Boggie: How the Lenfest AI Collaborative placed AI engineers in 10 newsrooms


The Philadelphia Inquirer never had an AI engineer on staff until the Lenfest AI Collaborative & Fellowship program changed that.



The collaborative is a $5 million partnership between the Lenfest Institute, OpenAI, and Microsoft that placed 10 AI fellows in American newsrooms for two years. These engineers work within the organizations, building tools that solve real newsroom problems.



This week on Newsroom Robots, host Nikita Roy sits down with Jim Friedlich, CEO and Executive Director of the Lenfest Institute, David Chivers, lead advisor to the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Matt Boggie, CTO of The Philadelphia Inquirer, to walk through how the program works and what the Inquirer has built as a result.



The Inquirer came to the collaborative with an idea to build a full-archive search tool that would let reporters query decades of journalism. They expected it to take 24 months. Within two weeks of a Microsoft hackathon, they had working code. The tool, now called Dewey, searches everything the Inquirer has published since 1978.



This episode covers:



03:02 — How the Lenfest AI Collaborative got started



05:34 — Can newsrooms trust big tech partners?



08:33 — How the fellowship works day to day



14:52– Inside the Microsoft hackathon that built Dewey in two weeks



21:37 — Training journalists to understand LLM limitations



24:07 — How AI literacy has changed newsroom culture



29:45 – How small newsrooms can get started with AI



35:14 — AI answers, search decline, and the future of audience traffic



38:15 — Rethinking journalism’s role in an AI-mediated world



41:23 — Closing reflections and personal AI use



This episode of Newsroom Robots is supported by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.



Sign up for the Newsroom Robots newsletter for episode summaries and insights from host Nikita Roy.


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2 weeks ago
47 minutes 29 seconds

Newsroom Robots
Tav Klitgaard: How Zetland turned a newsroom problem into a global AI business

This week on Newsroom Robots, host Nikita Roy is joined by Tav Klitgaard, the CEO of the Danish newsroom Zetland, to unpack the origin story of GoodTape — an AI transcription tool that began as an internal newsroom solution and evolved into a profitable, global product used far beyond journalism.



Zetland is an audio-first newsroom in Denmark. But GoodTape wasn’t born from an AI strategy or a product roadmap. It emerged from a familiar newsroom pain point of journalists spending hours transcribing interviews, with existing tools falling short, especially in non-English languages like Danish.



In this conversation, Tav breaks down how GoodTape went from an internal experiment to a standalone, subscription-based product that quickly became profitable, generated millions in revenue and was eventually divested. He also shares what building GoodTape taught Zetland about AI adoption, organizational learning, and where newsrooms should, and shouldn’t, use generative AI.



This episode covers:



05:50 – How a prototype using OpenAI’s Whisper sparked GoodTape



08:36 – The moment Zetland realized GoodTape could be a real product



12:34 – How journalism’s trust and privacy standards became a product advantage



13:59 – What actually improves transcription quality beyond the model itself



15:27 – How GoodTape became profitable and contributed to Zetland’s revenue



16:29 – Why Zetland eventually divested GoodTape instead of scaling it internally



17:36 – What building an AI product taught Zetland about newsroom AI adoption



19:08 – Why Zetland uses AI for productivity, not editorial output



28:14 – A real-world example of AI use that forced Zetland to rethink its own guidelines



30:34 – Why principles matter more than rigid AI rules in newsrooms



🎧 Listen to the full conversation with Tav Klitgaard on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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2 weeks ago
38 minutes 13 seconds

Newsroom Robots
Markus Franz: How Germany's Ippen Digital Is Prototyping the AI-Powered Newsroom of the Future

How do you redesign a newsroom’s entire workflow when AI is no longer a single tool, but a collection of agents, voice interfaces, and ambient intelligence changing how journalism gets produced?



This week on Newsroom Robots, host Nikita Roy is joined by Markus Franz, Chief Technology Officer at Ippen Digital, one of Germany’s largest digital media networks with more than 80 online news and media portals. This episode was recorded live at the Digital Growth Summit in Stuttgart, where Markus shared how his team is building some of the most forward-looking AI experiments in European media.



Markus leads Ippen Digital’s Incubator Lab, an innovation unit focused on reimagining how publishing and AI-driven experiences will evolve. With 16 years inside the company, Markus has been central to Ippen’s digital transformation and now leads efforts around multi-agent architectures and building adaptive workflows for the newsroom.



In this conversation, Markus breaks down how his lab is experimenting with multi-agent “virtual teams,” voice-first newsroom interfaces, multimodal content production and an ambient AI-powered newsroom where intelligent systems support journalists in real time. He shares what his team has learned from early prototypes, why the biggest challenges are cultural rather than technical, and how news organizations should think about guardrails, platform dependency, and the rise of self-evolving models.



This episode covers:



02:22 – Why Ippen Digital built an Incubator Lab and how it’s structured as a future-focused R&D unit



04:49 – What multi-agent systems look like inside a newsroom



9:42 – The case for voice as the next major interface for both journalists and audiences



14:41 – The shift from human-in-the-loop to human-on-the-loop workflows



17:40 – Guardrails for agent systems: grounding, bounding, editorial policies



19:33 – The vision for an ambient newsroom powered by AI companions and real-time intelligence



27:31 – Why vendor lock-in and self-evolving LLMs pose new strategic risks



30:08 – Multimodal personalization and rethinking how news is experienced



34:27 – Why most AI pilots fail and what experimentation looks like in practice



49:19 – Markus’s personal AI stack and how he uses these tools day-to-day


Sign up for the Newsroom Robots newsletter for episode summaries and insights from host Nikita Roy.


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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1 month ago
51 minutes 44 seconds

Newsroom Robots
Olle Zacharison: How BBC News is Shaping its AI Strategy for the Next Era of Journalism

How do you bring AI into a newsroom as big and globally distributed as the BBC, an editorial network that stretches across 42 languages and more than 5,000 journalists?



This week on Newsroom Robots, host Nikita Roy talks to Olle Zachrison, Head of News AI at BBC News, where he leads the BBC’s efforts to advance AI use and strengthen its journalism and audience experiences. Previously, the Head of AI at Swedish Radio, Olle has spent the past few years implementing practical newsroom AI workflows while upholding public-service values.



In our conversation, Olle breaks down BBC’s four-part AI strategy, covering large-scale translation and transcription, content reformatting, investigative tools, and early experiments with synthetic audio and conversational news. He shares what’s working inside one of the world’s largest news organizations, what routinely stalls AI projects, and why the most challenging part of AI transformation isn’t the technology but the collaboration required across editorial, product, and engineering. Olle also reflects on what it means to innovate as a public broadcaster in an AI-driven ecosystem, and why archives, credibility, and direct audience relationships will determine which journalism remains indispensable in the years ahead.


In this episode, we cover:


03:39 – The BBC’s four-part AI strategy: Boosting productivity, reformatting content, augmenting journalism, and innovating user experience as the core themes



05:10 – Using AI for large-scale transcription, tagging, live pages, alt text, newsletter production, and translation to save time and make content more searchable.



08:17 – Reformatting content across platforms and formats



20:59 – Innovating user experiences with synthetic audio and conversational formats



31:59 – How the BBC uses strategic themes, clear metrics, and fast pilots to decide what’s worth building and scaling



46:59 – Inside the BBC’s fine-tuned LLM and Style Assist



52:01 – What it means to be a public broadcaster in an AI-driven ecosystem



01:02:58 – Olle’s personal AI stack



Sign up for the Newsroom Robots newsletter for episode summaries and insights from host Nikita Roy.


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1 month ago
1 hour 5 minutes 39 seconds

Newsroom Robots
Vilas Dhar: Why the Future of Journalism Is Still Human

This week on Newsroom Robots, host Nikita Roy sits down with Vilas Dhar, President of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, one of the world's foremost philanthropies advancing AI for public good. Dhar leads a $1.5 billion endowment that has committed over $500 million to projects spanning climate action, public health, education, and democratic governance. He has served on the UN Secretary-General's High-Level Advisory Body on AI, is the U.S. government's nominated expert to the Global Partnership on AI, and was named a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2022.



Across philanthropy, policy, and technology, Dhar carries one central conviction: technology may accelerate, but the future of journalism and society must remain human-centered. Dhar introduces a three-part framework for ethical AI deployment (responsible data, clear boundaries, and transparency) and explains how to translate abstract principles into concrete newsroom decisions. He unpacks his LISA framework (Listen, Involve, Share, Assess) for audience-centered AI design, and tackles the hardest questions facing newsroom leaders: Should we buy or build AI tools? How do we balance innovation with environmental sustainability? What happens to human creativity when machines can create?



But perhaps most powerfully, Dhar challenges a deeply held belief in journalism: that media organizations can remain ‘just’ media companies in an AI-driven world. There is no way to be a media organization today without also being a technology organization, he argues, and that shift requires not just new tools, but a fundamental reckoning with organizational identity and purpose.


 

This epiosde covers:

00:31 – Introducing Vilas Dhar and his human-centered AI vision: Why technology should serve dignity, equity, and democracy—not just profit



02:17 – The three-part framework for ethical AI: Responsible data, clear boundaries, and transparency as actionable principles



07:08 – Questions leaders must ask before deploying AI: Who's involved? Who's accountable? Who has editorial control over AI use?



10:16 – The LISA framework: Listen, Involve, Share, Assess to turn AI experimentation into behind-the-scenes reporting that builds public trust



13:30 – Navigating ethical dilemmas around AI-generated content



13:51 – The three phases of newsroom AI adoption



18:54 – Why "we're not a tech company" no longer works



23:12 – Organizational reckoning in an 18-month transformation cycle



25:23 – Why smaller, targeted models and collective action matter more than massive systems



29:14 – Fighting misinformation with AI



34:13 – What journalism is missing compared to other industries



37:01 – The evolving role of human creativity and agency



39:33 – The McGovern Foundation's North Star



44:23 – How Vilas uses AI personally



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2 months ago
46 minutes 58 seconds

Newsroom Robots
Ludwig Siegele: Inside The Economist’s AI Playbook

How does a 182-year-old global magazine stay ahead in the age of generative AI? This week on Newsroom Robots, host Nikita Roy is joined by Ludwig Siegele, Senior Editor for AI Initiatives at The Economist. After more than 25 years reporting from San Francisco, Berlin, and London, Siegele now leads the publication’s AI strategy. He discusses how The Economist launched its AI Lab—a startup-style group within the organization with the freedom to test bold ideas and move quickly. The lab is charged with looking years ahead, preparing for a future where much of journalism’s supply chain may be automated, and ensuring The Economist maintains its identity in an AI-driven media ecosystem.


From practical newsroom wins like AI-powered translation and research pipelines to more experimental projects such as TikTok video dubbing and the SCOTUS bot, Siegele explains how The Economist is testing, iterating, and learning in real time. He also reflects on what hasn’t worked, the challenges of newsroom adoption, and why the next phase of journalism may require redefining the role of the journalist itself.



In this episode:


00:00 – Introducing Ludwig Siegele & The Economist’s AI journey


01:31 – How AI experimentation began at The Economist


03:26 – Overcoming newsroom fear of ChatGPT


04:53 – Building AI infrastructure and upskilling staff


07:10 – The tools and vendor partnerships powering experiments


08:29 – Why adoption is harder than building tools


12:10 – Translation, research, and NotebookLM as newsroom game changers


16:06 – How automation could reshape the journalist’s role


18:41 – Launching The Economist AI Lab


24:11 – Audience-facing AI experiments (TikTok dubbing, Espresso app, SCOTUS bot)


26:05 – Partnering with Google NotebookLM while protecting the brand


30:02 – Scraping, monetization, and the future of publisher revenue


33:41 – Measuring ROI on AI initiatives


37:40 – The biggest barriers to newsroom AI adoption


39:14 – How Ludwig uses AI personally in art and culture


40:40 – Closing reflections


Sign up for the Newsroom Robots newsletter for episode summaries and insights from host Nikita Roy.


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3 months ago
41 minutes 17 seconds

Newsroom Robots
Ivar Krustok: How Estonia’s Media Giant Builds AI That Actually Works

In Estonia, Delfi Meedia has built one of the strongest foundations for AI in journalism. With one of the highest digital subscription rates in the world, Delfi has moved beyond the buzz around AI to put it into everyday practice, supporting both its journalism and business.



In this episode, host Nikita Roy is joined by Ivar Krustok, Chief AI & Innovation Officer at Delfi Meedia. Ivar breaks down how a small-market publisher is shipping AI that actually helps journalists: from live cross-language translation and newsroom bots to an in-house “company ChatGPT” toolkit wired into 25 years of archives and public records.



Key topics include:

•Delfi’s three-bucket AI strategy: everyday newsroom tools, experimental long-term projects, and company-wide literacy.

•Why Delfi built its own “company ChatGPT” toolkit to search 25 years of archives.

•How bots and agents are transforming dashboards into conversational tools for subscriptions, ads, and editorial performance.

•Lessons from AI experiments, from court-case monitoring that surfaces hidden stories to audience-facing image generators.

•The ongoing challenge of scaling AI literacy across hundreds of staff while keeping adoption practical and trust-centered.



Sign up for the Newsroom Robots newsletter for episode summaries and insights from host Nikita Roy.


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3 months ago
1 hour 5 minutes 58 seconds

Newsroom Robots
Djordje Padejski: Why AI Literacy Belongs at the Core of Journalism Education

As a new academic year begins, journalism schools face a defining challenge: how to prepare students for a profession being reshaped by AI.



At Stanford University, Djordje Padejski is leading the way. A veteran investigative journalist and now associate director of the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford, he created one of the earliest AI-focused journalism courses at Arizona State University before bringing it to Stanford last year. His classroom is less lecture hall and more lab, where students test AI tools and also learn to examine them.



On Newsroom Robots, Djordje shared how he structures his course and what journalism schools must do to prepare the next generation of journalists.



Key topics include:



  • Why journalism education must move beyond teaching AI as just a tool and instead frame it as a socio-technical phenomenon.
  • How to embed AI literacy in classrooms by separating hype from reality, contextualizing the history of AI, and examining its cultural and ethical limits.
  • Practical strategies Djordje uses to structure his Stanford course, from lab-style experimentation to peer-led discussions that uncover both opportunities and pitfalls of tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and NotebookLM.
  • The importance of teaching students not just how to use AI but how to critically assess its strengths, biases, and limitations.
  • What a future journalism curriculum or degree built around AI might look like, and how educators across disciplines can prepare the next generation of reporters.



Sign up for the Newsroom Robots newsletter for episode summaries and insights from host Nikita Roy.


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3 months ago
47 minutes 40 seconds

Newsroom Robots
Sara Beykpour: The Next Chapter in News Aggregation

In this episode, host Nikita Roy  is joined by Sara Beykpour, co-founder and CEO of Particle News — the AI-powered news aggregator. Launched in November 2024, Particle blends multi-perspective coverage, concise AI-generated summaries, and a bias meter that makes framing visible, giving readers both speed and trust in the same experience.


Key topics include:


  • How Particle’s “Reality Check” process works using multi-source input and verification passes to minimize hallucinations and produce more accurate summaries.
  • Strategies Particle uses to maintain reader trust in an era when AI-generated summaries can quickly erode it.
  • How Particle surfaces bias with a meter that shows how coverage leans left, right, or center and updates as stories develop.
  • The role of topic-based personalization in avoiding filter bubbles while still giving readers tailored news feeds.



Sign up for the Newsroom Robots newsletter for episode summaries and insights from host Nikita Roy.


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4 months ago
51 minutes 31 seconds

Newsroom Robots
Florent Daudens: How Open-Source AI Puts Newsrooms Back in the Driver’s Seat

What if the future of journalism isn’t locked behind the paywalls of big tech companies, but freely available to every newsroom willing to embrace it?



Too often, the conversation around AI in newsrooms centers on big tech, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini. These are powerful tools, no doubt but they come with caveats: mainly cost, limited transparency, and little to no control over where your data ends up.



But there’s another world of AI rapidly evolving in parallel and it might be journalism’s best path forward: open-source AI.



In this episode of Newsroom Robots, host Nikita Roy reconnects with returning guest Florent Daudens, now the Press Lead at Hugging Face, one of the leading platforms powering open source AI. Formerly a newsroom leader driving AI integration at Canada’s Radio-Canada, Florent now sits at the heart of the open source AI movement.



Key topics include:


  • Why open source AI matters for journalism and how it compares to proprietary models
  • The rise of AI agents and what they mean for editorial control and user experience
  • How compressed, privacy-first models running on laptops and phones could change the game
  • The environmental cost of AI and how newsrooms can make more sustainable tech choices
  • What news apps might look like in an agent-powered future
  • How newsrooms can start experimenting with open source AI (no dev team required)



Plus, Florent shares 20 must-know open source AI tools for journalists, explains how writing is building in the age of AI, and discusses why owning the experience, not just the content, will be key to journalism’s survival



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5 months ago
1 hour 4 minutes 24 seconds

Newsroom Robots
Fabian Heckenberg, Naja Nielsen & Gard Steiro: The Hard Truths About AI Every Newsroom Leader Can’t Ignore (Recorded Live at Nordic AI in Media Summit 2025)

In this live episode of Newsroom Robots, host Nikita Roy moderates a panel discussion recorded at the Nordic AI and Media Summit in Copenhagen. The conversation features Gard Steiro (Editor-in-Chief and CEO of VG in Norway), Fabian Heckenberger (Managing Editor and Senior Editor for AI at Süddeutsche Zeitung in Germany), and Naja Nielsen (Media Director at SVT in Sweden and former Digital Director at BBC News).



They discuss how news organizations are approaching the complexities of integrating AI into editorial workflows, organizational strategy, and audience experiences. The conversation focuses on the tensions, trade-offs, and open questions that newsroom leaders are wrestling with.



Key topics include:



  • How AI is shifting from isolated projects to infrastructure across newsroom operations, and the implications for leadership and cross-functional teams.
  • Why VG uses a fixed one-year runway model to evaluate AI experiments, and what happens when projects don’t deliver measurable outcomes.
  • The role of transparency and relevance in building trust with audiences, particularly for younger and emerging user groups.
  • SVT’s approach to organizational learning, including how leadership can empower experimentation without centralizing all decision-making.
  • What interdisciplinary teams look like in practice—drawing on SZ’s experience embedding editorial staff into product and tech teams.
  • Challenges with prioritization: choosing between maintaining legacy systems, launching new GenAI tools, or refining user experience.
  • Why personalization can’t rely on a human-in-the-loop model, and how AI agents may soon take on quality assurance roles within content pipelines.
  • Emerging revenue considerations: from small-scale funding streams and philanthropic support to fundamental questions about what people are actually willing to pay for.



The episode wraps with a candid exchange about whether the article format has outlived its usefulness in an era of personalized, multimodal news delivery and what that means for the future of storytelling and journalistic impact.



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5 months ago
40 minutes 21 seconds

Newsroom Robots
Gina Chua: Where Journalism’s Value Lives When AI Tells the Story

In this live episode, host Nikita Roy sits down with Gina Chua, Executive Editor of Semafor, recorded at an event at New York University hosted in collaboration with the AI networking group, Humans in the Loop. Gina brings a uniquely expansive lens to the AI conversation, grounded in her leadership across global newsrooms—from Reuters and The Wall Street Journal to the South China Morning Post. Now at Semafor, she continues to be a leading voice rethinking the information ecosystem for an AI-driven world.



In this wide-ranging and candid conversation, Gina explores how generative AI is reshaping the fundamental architecture of journalism—from editorial workflows and business models to the core definition of a story. She discusses her team’s experiments with building custom AI tools like Miso, a multilingual aggregation system powering Semafor’s Signals format.



Key topics include:



  • How Semafor is using AI for multilingual search, editorial summarization, and style guide enforcement built directly into Google Suite workflows using App Scripts and Claude.
  • The challenges of building durable AI products in newsrooms including unstable models, integration hurdles, and evolving use cases.
  • Rethinking the role of journalists in an AI world: where value lies in asking the right questions, building audience understanding, and creating narratives only humans can shape.
  • The importance of reframing journalism’s mission not as saving “journalists” or “journalism,” but as delivering information in the public interest.
  • Behind-the-scenes on JESS (Journalist Expert Safety Support), a chatbot Gina prototyped and co-developed to democratize access to field safety guidance for reporters worldwide.
  • Why the future of news depends on tight, authentic relationships with audiences and how startups like Semafor are designing for trust, voice, and community from the ground up.



The episode closes with reflections on Gina’s personal coding journey with AI including her work building an assistive tool for a friend with ALS.



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6 months ago
51 minutes 15 seconds

Newsroom Robots
Zach Seward: How a Five-Person AI Team Is Powering Innovation at The New York Times

In this live episode, host Nikita Roy sits down with Zach Seward, Editorial Director of AI Initiatives at The New York Times, recorded at the ONA x Newsroom Robots AI Leadership Summit in Detroit. With a background that spans journalism, product, and executive leadership, Zach brings a rare blend of newsroom insight and entrepreneurial thinking to the challenges of this AI era. Before joining the Times, he co-founded Quartz, where he served as editor-in-chief, CEO, and chief product officer, helping to pioneer digital-native journalism.



Now at The Times, he’s built a new editorial AI team from the ground up, experimenting with tooling, guiding newsroom adoption, and thinking through what comes next in how journalism is produced, distributed, and consumed.



Key topics include:



  • How the Times is using AI to support investigations, including analyzing hundreds of hours of leaked video and massive public data sets using custom LLM workflows.
  • Echo, the in-house summarization tool that’s helping reporters transform articles, headlines, and tags across a range of newsroom needs.
  • Lessons from building a five-person AI team inside a 2,000-person newsroom and why newsroom trust and individual agency are central to successful adoption.
  • Why Zach’s team sees itself as an “AI enablement” group and how their newsroom-wide roadshow has sparked experimentation.
  • The role of AI in reader experiences, from improving internal search to exploring voice interfaces that reimagine how audiences interact with journalism.
  • What it means to build durable, future-ready news products in a media environment increasingly shaped by AI distribution and personalization systems.



Sign up for the Newsroom Robots newsletter for episode summaries and insights from host Nikita Roy.



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7 months ago
58 minutes 35 seconds

Newsroom Robots
Cheryl Phillips: How AI Is Uncovering Hidden Stories in Local Government

When officials in Santa Clara County (home to Silicon Valley) publicly proclaimed they were not sharing data with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, they likely did not expect to be caught in a contradiction. Yet behind the scenes, those same officials had recently signed new contracts with the federal agency — a fact that might have remained hidden if not for a new generation of AI tools developed at Stanford University.



This breakthrough was made possible by Big Local News, a Stanford-based initiative using AI to help local journalists uncover stories hidden deep within public records. As local newsrooms grapple with shrinking resources and overwhelming amounts of data, tools like these are helping restore investigative capacity where it’s needed most.

In this episode of Newsroom Robots, Cheryl Phillips, founder and co-director of Big Local News at Stanford University, joins host Nikita Roy to share how her team is building AI-powered tools that support watchdog journalism and make complex data more accessible to reporters across the country.



Key topics include:

  • Agenda Watch, a tool that scrapes and indexes public meeting agendas to surface early signals of newsworthy developments across thousands of local agencies.
  • DataTalk, an AI assistant that turns natural language questions into campaign finance data queries, simplifying analysis for journalists without coding expertise.
  • The use of generative AI and large-scale scraping systems to analyze police misconduct records and create public-facing accountability databases.
  • How Big Local News uses Slack-integrated bots to deliver real-time alerts on layoffs and problematic fiscal audits to local newsrooms across the U.S.



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7 months ago
51 minutes 1 second

Newsroom Robots
Kasper Lindskow: Building a Scalable AI Infrastructure at Denmark's JP/Politikens Media Group

When it comes to AI adoption, experimentation is easy—scaling is hard. So, what is the difference between AI projects that fade out and those that transform newsrooms? A strong infrastructure.



In this episode of Newsroom Robots, Kasper Lindskow, the head of AI at JP/Politikens Media Group joins host Nikita Roy. Kasper shares how as one of Denmark's largest media groups they are building a scalable AI infrastructure across multiple news brands, balancing technical innovation with editorial values.



Key topics include:

  • The Platform Intelligence in News (PIN) Project — their comprehensive research initiative that brought together technical universities and social science departments
  • Magna — their flagship AI suite that adapts to each publication's unique voice and offers tools from basic writing assistance to complex research capabilities
  • How JP/Politikens evolved from a single-newsroom AI team to a centralized unit with "local AI hubs" at each publication
  • The "Values Compass" framework that ensures AI systems align with journalistic integrity
  • How they customized AI tools for different publications and integrated them into daily newsroom workflows



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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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9 months ago
59 minutes 47 seconds

Newsroom Robots
Rune Ytreberg and Lars Adrian Giske: How iTromsø is Building an AI-Ready Foundation for News

Imagine a newsroom where AI agents assist with reporting, actively surface leads, analyze government data, and help journalists navigate complex investigations in real time. Norway’s iTromsø is laying the groundwork for exactly that.



In the second part of this episode with Rune Ytreberg, head of data journalism at iTromsø, and Lars Adrian Giske, head of AI join host Nikita Roy to share how their small but ambitious newsroom is systematically building an infrastructure for AI-powered journalism. This isn’t just about isolated tools—it’s about creating a cohesive ecosystem where AI enhances reporting at every level.



Rather than simply bolting AI onto existing workflows, iTromsø is focused on building a structured data infrastructure that supports AI agents across multiple newsroom functions.



Their vision includes:

  • A centralized AI-powered data interface that allows journalists to filter, analyze, and cross-reference government records, public documents, and municipal archives.
  • Automated news alerts that notify reporters when AI detects important patterns or anomalies in the data.
  • A structured repository of historical data, ensuring journalists have context-rich information at their fingertips, allowing for deeper investigative work.



This structured approach isn’t just about efficiency—it’s about creating a foundation where AI can play an active role in surfacing critical stories.



iTromsø is designing an AI-ready newsroom—one where structured data, automated insights, and AI-assisted research come together to elevate investigative journalism.



Sign up for the Newsroom Robots newsletter for episode summaries and insights from host Nikita Roy.



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10 months ago
51 minutes 48 seconds

Newsroom Robots
Rune Ytreberg & Lars Adrian Giske: Building AI Tools for Investigative Journalism in Local News

Translating a journalist's gut instinct into code—is it possible? In Norway, iTromsø—a long-standing regional newspaper known for its investigative journalism and deep local coverage—has found a way.



Their AI system, DJINN (Data Journalism Interface for News Gathering and Notification), acts like an experienced beat reporter, scanning hundreds of municipal documents and surfacing the most newsworthy leads. The impact? In their first week using DJINN, summer interns fresh out of journalism school produced five front-page stories—on a beat that usually takes years to master.



In this episode of Newsroom Robots, Rune Ytreberg and Lars Adrian Giske join host Nikita Roy to talk about iTromsø’s structured approach to AI-driven reporting and how they built tools that strengthen their local journalism.



Rune leads iTromsø’s data journalism lab, where he has been developing AI-driven editorial solutions for 70 local newspapers within the Polaris Media Group since 2020. And Lars is the Head of AI at iTromsø and led the development of DJINN. Since its launch in 2023, 36 newspapers across Norway have adopted DJINN, sourcing documents from nearly half of all Norwegian municipalities.



Key topics include:

•How a small newsroom built AI tools to strengthen investigative journalism

•Why their AI systems are designed for specific beats like urban planning and fisheries, reducing hallucinations and increasing precision.

•Embedding editorial expertise in AI development

•How their fisheries database flagged irregularities and how their urban planning system transformed local accountability coverage.



This is just Part 1 of our deep dive into how iTromsø is using AI to power investigative reporting. In Part 2, Rune and Lars will discuss their latest project: AI-powered research assistants that will proactively surface investigative leads for their journalists.



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10 months ago
46 minutes 50 seconds

Newsroom Robots
Neil Brown: The Pulitzer Prizes, AI Transparency, and Journalism’s Next Evolution

Neil Brown, president of The Poynter Institute and former chair of the Pulitzer Prizes, joins host Nikita Roy to discuss the Pulitzer Board's decision to require AI disclosure in prize submissions. In 2024, two Pulitzer Prize winners disclosed using AI in their work - City Bureau and Invisible Institute used machine learning to analyze police misconduct files for "Missing in Chicago," while The New York Times' visual investigations desk employed AI to identify bomb craters in Gaza. Of the 45 finalists that year, five had disclosed using AI in their submissions.



In this episode, Brown discusses how the Pulitzer Board approached AI disclosure requirements and shares his perspective on technology's evolving role in journalism.



Key topics include:

  • The Pulitzer Board's approach to AI disclosure and transparency
  • How newsrooms can bridge the divide between technical and editorial teams
  • Why newsrooms need to take a longitudinal approach to technology adoption
  • The importance of involving audiences in technological innovation
  • Lessons from journalism's digital transformation that apply to the AI era



Sign up for the Newsroom Robots newsletter for episode summaries and insights from host Nikita Roy.



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10 months ago
42 minutes 43 seconds

Newsroom Robots
Upasna Gautam: The Product Manager's Guide to AI in News

Upasna Gautam, Senior Platform Product Manger at CNN and Chair of the Board of Directors at the News Product Alliance, joins host Nikita Roy to discuss her framework for AI integration in newsrooms. 



In this episode, Gautam breaks down her three-question approach to AI implementation and shares insights from building CNN's content management platform Stellar. Through practical examples from CNN's journey and her work with newsrooms globally, Gautam offers a systematic framework for evaluating which AI opportunities are worth pursuing.



Key topics include:

  • How CNN operates like a tech company
  • Three essential areas for AI in news: workflow orchestration, data integration, and content modularity
  • Building trust with journalists by focusing on concrete benefits over technology hype
  • Framework for evaluating AI opportunities that works for newsrooms of any size
  • Transforming editorial teams into "mini PMs" who shape technology adoption
  • Strategies for successful AI implementation in resource-constrained newsrooms



Sign up for the Newsroom Robots newsletter for episode summaries and insights from host Nikita Roy.



Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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1 year ago
40 minutes

Newsroom Robots
Looking to explore the intersection of AI and journalism? Influential thought leaders in the industry join data scientist and media entrepreneur, Nikita Roy, each week to explore what's next with AI and its implications for the media landscape. In each episode, industry experts discuss how automated newsrooms have the potential to change journalism and uncover opportunities to optimize workflows and increase efficiency without compromising journalistic integrity.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.