Newsroom Robots

For most of journalism’s history, the article has been the atomic unit of news: a fixed container, written once and served the same way to everyone. That’s beginning to change. AI is moving out from behind the scenes, where it quietly powered efficiencies, and into the interface itself, where it can assemble, personalize, and adapt the news to each reader. On this week’s episode of Newsroom Robots...

At The Seattle Times, an AI tool identified a new prospect and helped close additional ad revenue in a single day. The Seattle Times is one of 11 news organizations participating in the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program, funded by OpenAI and Microsoft. Through this initiative, AI engineering fellow Rajesh Barade worked with the advertising team to address their challenges and develop...

For years, the aggregator model was simple: curate the best journalism from thousands of publishers and send audiences their way. Now that contract is being rewritten, and Yahoo News is one of the most interesting places to watch it happen. In this episode of Newsroom Robots, host Nikita Roy speaks with Kat Downs Mulder, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Yahoo News, about how the platfo...

AI is settling in as infrastructure within newsrooms, a layer quietly reshaping how journalists discover information, how stories move through production, and how audiences increasingly expect news to reach them. In this episode of Newsroom Robots, recorded live in New York City at TV News Check’s News Tech Forum, host Nikita Roy brings together four industry leaders to examine the tangible ways A...

Most major newsrooms have now moved beyond early experimentation with AI. The main challenge now is determining how to govern effectively, scale consistently, and strategically position AI across the entire organization—while maintaining public trust as a central priority. This week on Newsroom Robots, host Nikita Roy sits down with Uli Köppen, Chief AI Officer at Bavarian Broadcasting (BR), to ta...

Chicago Public Media operates two distinct news brands: WBEZ, the public radio station, and the Chicago Sun-Times, the legacy newspaper. With audio and print journalism, both membership and advertising revenue, and decades of archives in multiple formats, they're a unique case study for AI in local news. When CEO Melissa Bell joined the organization, there was interest in AI but no dedicated resou...

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, Manag...

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...

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 probl...

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 produ...

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 p...

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...

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'...

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 gro...

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 d...

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 U...

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” proc...

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 y...

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...

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. No...

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...

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 d...

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...

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 s...

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 newswort...