Newsroom Robots

By 2026, most leading newsrooms have moved past the question of whether AI belongs in their organization. Now the key question is: what does a sustainable AI product strategy look like when you’re building for a subscription-based business and a high-trust brand?This week on Newsroom Robots, host, Nikita Roy sits down with Alessandro Alviani, Lead for Generative AI, and Fabian Heckenberger, Managing Editor for AI, at Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung to discuss how they’re using AI to build the next generation of news products.This conversation looks at what happens when AI becomes a permanent layer in a newsroom’s product stack. Alessandro and Fabian walk through how they’re designing AI experiences that fit naturally with reader behavior and how they’re developing new distribution and accessibility formats that would have been impossible to sustain manually.This episode also goes deep on a topic that’s becoming a defining competency which is operational trust. What do you monitor once an AI product is live? How do you categorize failures? And how do you respond quickly when something goes wrong, without panic and without eroding your brand?This episode, we cover:02:52 — How editorial and product roles complement each other in AI strategy13:13 — Addressing skepticism and fear around AI in the newsroom25:17 — Inside building the German election chatbot31:10 — The design framework that signals AI content without eroding trust35:30 — Real-time risk management and monitoring for live AI tools48:50 — The two questions every newsroom should ask before greenlighting an AI project54:55 — Closing reflections and personal AI useSign 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.

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 year08:55 — The shift from search to answers and why it breaks old business models14:40 — Proactive AI and what ChatGPT Pulse reveals about the next distribution layer20:30 — Journalism’s hidden work and why persistence, source building, and human judgment still matter23:30 — Why news orgs must move upstream from content to structured knowledge36:10 — AI agents: what they actually are, what they are not, and why transparency matters41:20 — The overlooked shift: Model Context Protocol (MCP) and why it is a major newsroom disruption51:05 — Predictions for 2026Sign 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.

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 started05:34 — Can newsrooms trust big tech partners?08:33 — How the fellowship works day to day14:52– Inside the Microsoft hackathon that built Dewey in two weeks21:37 — Training journalists to understand LLM limitations24:07 — How AI literacy has changed newsroom culture29:45 – How small newsrooms can get started with AI35:14 — AI answers, search decline, and the future of audience traffic38:15 — Rethinking journalism’s role in an AI-mediated world41:23 — Closing reflections and personal AI useThis 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 GoodTape08:36 – The moment Zetland realized GoodTape could be a real product12:34 – How journalism’s trust and privacy standards became a product advantage13:59 – What actually improves transcription quality beyond the model itself15:27 – How GoodTape became profitable and contributed to Zetland’s revenue16:29 – Why Zetland eventually divested GoodTape instead of scaling it internally17:36 – What building an AI product taught Zetland about newsroom AI adoption19:08 – Why Zetland uses AI for productivity, not editorial output28:14 – A real-world example of AI use that forced Zetland to rethink its own guidelines30:34 – Why principles matter more than rigid AI rules in newsroomsSign 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.

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 unit04:49 – What multi-agent systems look like inside a newsroom9:42 – The case for voice as the next major interface for both journalists and audiences14:41 – The shift from human-in-the-loop to human-on-the-loop workflows17:40 – Guardrails for agent systems: grounding, bounding, editorial policies19:33 – The vision for an ambient newsroom powered by AI companions and real-time intelligence27:31 – Why vendor lock-in and self-evolving LLMs pose new strategic risks30:08 – Multimodal personalization and rethinking how news is experienced34:27 – Why most AI pilots fail and what experimentation looks like in practice49:19 – Markus’s personal AI stack and how he uses these tools day-to-daySign 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.