Tag: #tech

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Kasper Lindskow, JP Politiken Media Group: “Generative AI can Give Journalists Superpowers”

Kasper Lindskow is the Head of AI at the Danish Politiken Media Group, one of the front runners in implementing GenAI based solutions in the industry. He is also co-founder of the Nordic AI in Media Summit, a leading industry conference on AI. Alexandra spoke to him about how to bring people along with new technologies, conflicts in the newsroom, and how to get the right tone of voice in the journalism. 

Kasper, industry insiders regard JP/Politiken as a role model in implementing AI in its newsrooms. Which tools have been the most attractive for your employees so far?  

We rolled out a basic ChatGPT clone in a safe environment to all employees in March 2024 and are in the process of rolling out more advanced tools. The key for us has been to “toolify” AI so that it can be used broadly across the organization, also for the more advanced stuff.  

Now, the front runners are using it in all sorts of different creative ways. But we are seeing the classic cases being used most widely, like proofreading and adaptation to the writing guides of our different news brands, for example suggesting headlines.  

We’ve seen growing use of AI also for searching the news archive and writing text boxes.  

Roughly estimated, what’s the share of people in your organization who feel comfortable using AI tools on a daily basis? 

Well, the front runners are experimenting with them regardless of whether we make tools available. I’d estimate this group to be between 10 and 15 percent of newsroom staff. I’d say we have an equally small group who are not interested in interacting with AI at all.  

And then we have the most interesting group, between 70 and 80 percent or so of journalists who are interested and having tried to work with AI a little bit.  

From our perspective, the most important part of rolling out AI is to build tools that fit that group to ensure a wider adoption. The potential is not in the front runners but in the normal, ordinary journalists. 

This sounds like a huge, expensive effort. How large is your team?  

We are an organization of roughly 3,000 people. Currently we are 11 people working full-time on AI development in the centralized AI unit plus two PhDs. That’s not a lot. But we also work for local AI hubs in different newsrooms, so people there spend time working with us.  

This is costly. It does take time and effort, in particular if you want high quality and you want to ensure everything aligns with the journalism.  

I do see a risk here of companies underinvesting and only doing the efficiency part and not aligning it with the journalism. 

Do you have public-facing tools and products? 

In recommender systems we do, because that’s about personalizing the news flow. That’s public facing and enabled by metadata.  

We’re also activating metadata in ways that are public facing just for example in “read more” lists that are not personalized.  

But in general, we’re not doing anything really public facing with generative AI that does not have humans in the loop yet. 

What are the biggest conflicts around AI in your organization or in the newsroom? 

Most debates are about automated recommender systems. Because sometimes they churn out stuff that colleagues don’t find relevant.  

But our journalists have very different reading profiles from the general public. They read everything and then they criticize when something very old turns up.  

And then, of course, you have people thinking: “What will this do to my job?”  

But all in all, there hasn’t been much criticism. We are getting a lot more requests like: “Can you please build this for me?” 

What do you think the advancement of generative AI will do to the news industry as a whole? 

Let’s talk about risks first. There’s definitely a risk of things being rolled out too fast. This is very new technology. We know some limitations, others we don’t.  

So, it is important to roll it out responsibly at a pace that people can handle and with the proper education along the way.  

If you roll it out too fast there will be mistakes that would both hurt the rollout of AI and the potential you could create with it, impacting the trustworthiness of news.  

Another risk is not taking the need to align these systems with your initial mission seriously enough. 

Some organizations struggle with strategic alignment, could you explain this a bit, please?  

Generative AI has a well-known tendency to gravitate towards the median in its output – meaning that if you have that fast prototype with a small prompt and roll it out then your articles tend to become dull, ordinary and average.  

It’s not necessarily a tool for excellence. It can be but you really need to do it right. You need to align it with the news brand and its particular tone of voice, for example. That requires extensive work, user testing and fine-tuning of the systems underneath.  

If we don’t take the journalistic work seriously, either because we don’t have resources to do it or because we don’t know it or move too fast, it could have a bad impact on what we’re trying to achieve. Those are the risk factors that we can impact ourselves. 

The other risks depend on what happens in the tech industry? 

A big one is when other types of companies begin using AI to do journalism. 

You mean companies that are not bound by journalistic values? 

If you’re not a public service broadcaster but a private media company, for the past 20 years you’ve experienced a structural decline.  

If tech giants begin de-bundling the news product even further by competing with journalists, this could accelerate the structural decline of news media.  

But we should talk about opportunities now. Because if done properly, generative AI in particular has massive potential. It can give journalists superpowers.  

Because it helps to enrich storytelling and to automate the boring tasks? 

We are not there yet. But generative AI is close to having the potential for, once you have done your news work with finding the story, telling that story across different modalities.  

And to me that is strong positive potential for addressing different types of readers and audiences. 

We included a case study on Magna in the first EBU News Report which was published in June 2024. What have your biggest surprises been since then? 

My biggest positive surprise is the level of feedback we are getting from our journalists. They’re really engaging with these tools. It’s extremely exciting for us as an AI unit that we are no longer working from assumptions but we are getting this direct feedback.  

I am positively surprised but also cautious about the extent to which we have been able to adapt these systems to our individual news brands. Our tool Magna is a shared infrastructure framework for everyone.  

But when you ask it to perform a task it gives very different output depending on the brand you request it for. You get, for example, a more tabloid-style response for Ekstra Bladet and a more sophisticated one for our upmarket Politiken.  

A lot of work went into writing very different prompts for the different brands.  

What about the hallucinations everyone is so afraid of? 

This was another surprise. We thought that factuality was going to be the big issue. We had many tests and found out that when we use it correctly and ground it in external facts, we are seeing very few factual errors and hallucinations.  

Usually, they stem from an article in the archive that is outdated because something new happened, not because of any hallucinations inside the model.  

The issue is more getting the feel right in the output, the tone of voice, the angles that are chosen in this publication that we’re working with – everything that has to do with the identity of the news brand.  

This interview was published by the EBU as an appetizer for the News Report “Leading Newsrooms in the Age of Generative AI” on .8th April 2025.

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Tav Klitgaard, CEO Zetland: “We don’t like perfect, because perfect is not trustworthy”

The Danish news media Zetland belongs among the few big success stories in European digital media brands. It was profitable three years after being launched, attracts a comparatively young audience and is set to launch a new brand in Finland in January 2025. I spoke to their CEO Tav Klitgaard about how to engage audiences, working business models and the future of journalism in an AI-supported word.    

Tav, interviews shouldn’t begin with praise, but Zetland is an outstanding success story in digital media. Your team founded it in 2016, it was profitable three years later. Today you have more than 40.000 digital subscribers. What do you do that others don’t

An advantage was that we did not have any print legacy when we started. We had the privilege of sitting down and thinking really hard about what does news media mean. Among other things, we found out that it means journalism is an experience. You have the content and then you have the distribution. Those two together create an experience. The value does not lie in the journalism. The value lies in the moment when the journalism becomes an experience that changes something in your head.

But you seem to be very proud of your journalism?

Sure, we are! But existing companies way too often produce journalism from a sender’s perspective. We always try to have a receiver perspective. I would see this as the key reason for our success.

Zetland doesn’t do breaking news but publishes just a few in-depth stories a day, it focuses on explanation and analysis and has offered everything in audio format from the beginning.

Our first principle is that we are our members. This is why we came up with audio, because we asked them and they said: ‘Well, I really would want to consume your articles, but I’ve been looking into a screen for 10 hours today and I’m tired of it.’ We said, then audio could be a thing for you. And it turned out we were right.

In the age of generative AI, converting stuff to audio will be very, very easy. Won’t you lose your competitive advantage when everyone can just press the audio button everywhere?

I believe the last frontier against AI is personality. Audio is awesome at creating an intimate relationship. So, when we create a human audio product, we don’t use an AI robot voice, because the problem with that is that it’s too good. It’s perfect. We don’t like perfect because perfect is not trustworthy. You should not be perfect, you should be a human. And that’s what we are doing in all our products, creating something that is human.

Managers from traditional news outlets envy you because your audience skews young.

We are not a news outlet for young people, but we do have a pretty young demographic. About 50 percent of our audience is in their 20s and 30s. And we believe that the way that you build trust within a younger audience is to be human. It’s a giga trend in the world that that the trust is moving from authorities to persons. That’s also the reason behind the success of Instagram or TikTok. That’s why we always focus on the tone of voice and the storytelling. We imagine ourselves to be your friend and get into the car with you and tell you the story from the passenger seat. The world is super interesting. But there needs to be energy and engagement behind the stories we tell.

Part of your distribution model is people need to pay for a membership, but they can share the story with as many people as they like to. Don’t you fear that many free riders are taking advantage of you?

That’s right, our readers can share everything for free. Actually, the more members share our content, the happier we are. It proves to us and themselves that it has value to them, and it means more people get to know us. Journalism is great when it is discussed, and it should be easy for our members to get someone to discuss it with. It’s also great for our sources that they can freely share what they told us in their own network.

A Zetland membership is pretty expensive compared to other digital subscriptions though. 

Yeah, it costs around 18 or 19 euros per month. I keep hearing: Young people don’t want to pay for news. That is not true. You have to look at the user needs. If people don’t want to pay, it’s because your product is not valuable to them. If you look at, let’s say, a person who is 25 years old. She has a strong need to understand the world. Who am I in this world? What does society mean for me? What do I mean for society? The key is to not require a whole lot of prior knowledge for her to understand the world but to tell her super interesting stories about the world. Younger audiences are underserved by the media, at least in Denmark. If you’re 60 and a doctor and live in Copenhagen, well, you have a plethora of options. If you’re 26 and a nurse working at a rural hospital, you don’t have a lot of places to go to in the media world. So, what happens? You end up at TikTok. The right price is whatever value the product gives to the user. Our average member spends more than seven hours per month with us. I think €18,50 is actually very cheap for seven hours of value.

Are you still growing or have you reached a ceiling with your particular audience?

We are growing very much. On the group level, we will have a revenue growth of at least 40 percent this year and I pretty conservatively project that to be the case next year, too. It’s not a 40 percent growth in Denmark, but it’s a 40 percent for the group which consists of journalism outlets in Denmark and now in Finland. And then we also sell other things, for instance, we sell books and technology.

So, you’re not only a media and journalism company, but also a tech company.

Exactly. The day before ChatGPT was launched, we launched our transcription service. That means very early on, we have been working with large language models and generative AI. The number one use case people think about when thinking about AI and journalism is transcription. So, we built a transcription service that for the first time ever has worked in Danish. That is basically contributing almost a quarter of our revenue this year. We also sell our distribution technology. We license the website and app and CMS that we built for Zetland to other media companies. It’s not something that we do to become filthy rich, but we need to be tech-savvy. Spotify is spending a gazillion dollars on tech development, and we need to be able to compete with Spotify.

You are planning to scale the Zetland concept internationally? Tell us about the Finnish project that you made headlines with recently.

The Finland case is super exciting for us. Three or four years ago we decided that we would begin the international journey. My background is within tech and in the tech industry, we always say if you have a product market fit, the next thing you need to do is scale. It’s not as easy as translating something, but we asked ourselves if the concept was replicable outside of Denmark. In the beginning of 2024, we hired a founding team in Finland and tasked them with creating a splash in the market to test whether our assumptions were right: that there is no big difference between Finnish people and Danish people in terms of what user needs they have. We talked about our mission of quality journalism and then said: If you’re willing to pay for this, we’re willing to build it. And that’s what we told them in September and October. What happened was that 10,000 Finns decided to prepay a subscription worth around 100 euros, which was much more than we had anticipated. We got 10,000 Finns to pay for something that does not exist!

When will it start to exist?

We are currently hiring a ton of people in Helsinki, a lot of journalists, and then we will start publishing the Finnish version of Zetland on 15th January.

What will you name it?

Zetland in Finland is called Uusi Juttu, meaning something like “The new thing”. Check it at uusijuttu.fi.

Do you have other markets where you have these kinds of assumptions or is this a Nordic thing? After all, the willingness to pay for journalism is much lower in other regions of Europe.

I think what we have learned to do in Denmark is very usable in a lot of different markets in Europe. It could also be outside of Europe, but it’s going to take us some time, some partners, and some money to be able to prove that I’m right.

Of course, I have to ask you about Germany now.

Well, Germany is definitely interesting, and it’s close to Denmark. If anyone who reads this thinks they want to build that in Germany, please reach out, because it’s also obvious for us that we are not going to be able to do it alone. We would need German partners who agree to our mission and are awesome journalists, tech people, and businesspeople.

Is there still some advice you could give to legacy media, or do you think they’re just lost?

If you have a print paper, you have to really, really think about why do you have a print paper? Most managers say: because it’s profitable. This means they do not focus 100 percent on the future and will innovate at a much slower pace.

What is the future of journalism in the age of AI?

I think there is a golden future for journalism. I think that the user needs that journalism fills are very much there, also among younger audiences. People need someone with feelings and with human intent to tell them about what’s going on. Plus, I believe that besides information, people want community and a sense of belonging. And I think journalism is wonderful at filling these needs. That’s why I believe that that there is a golden future.

So, it will be a golden future for less journalism, a lower volume at least.

Yes, I think that there has been a lot of work within journalism that has really been not super creative and that will go away.

Interview: Alexandra Borchardt

This text was published in German and English by the industry publication Medieninsider on 5th January 2025. 

 

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Good-bye, Print – Time to Go All Out for Saving Journalism

The printed newspaper has been on life-support for a while, but chances are it might not survive the corona crisis. Now it is critical that the journalism doesn’t get dragged down with it – at a time when it is essential for survival.

Clayton Christensen did not live to see the corona crisis. The professor of Harvard Business School who developed the famous concept of disruptive innovation died of cancer this year in January. In his book “The Innovator’s Dilemma” he dealt with the inherent reluctance of highly successful companies to reinvent their business models when confronted with ground-breaking new technologies. In an article called „Breaking News“ he addressed the media industry in particular. This was in 2012.

Eight years later the Covid-19 pandemic throws the world economy into a disruption of unheard proportions. It fosters technological adaptation and forces innovation at rapid speed. Only in retrospect will we learn which ones of these will prove to be truly innovative – as in good for society. But the world of business and work will never be the same again.

What we see in the media industry might not differ too much from others: Companies that have already embraced technological change and made it part of their culture are better off now. In these days of uncertainty when people are craving news and information like never before, they engage readers through their digital channels and products and gain subscribers in unprecedented proportions. Even the ones who have taken their paywalls down for coronavirus coverage attract loyal readers who are willing to pay for quality journalism.

The others, who have been rather cautious in marketing digital subscriptions while guarding their revenues from printed newspapers like a treasure are now at the tail end. They face the innovator’s dilemma as described by Christensen, their fight for survival will be particularly fierce. Because the breakdown of the advertising market combined with looming production challenges mean that the remaining days of print will be counted down much faster now than ever before.

In some places, the countdown is over already. British JPI media group recently announced to stop print production for twelve titles. A city like Milton Keynes with more than 200 000 inhabitants will then have no newspaper any longer. In case of the coronavirus, this situation is particularly tricky, because the most vulnerable part of the population is at the same time the digitally most underserved and therefore print dependent: the elderly.

In the US, bets are already on about who will be running out of the cash needed to fuel the printing presses. Many local newspapers are directly or indirectly owned by investment funds who tend to get rather impatient with financial underperformance. The number of news deserts that don’t have any local journalism to offer will grow once more.

The thought of reducing the number of weekdays when print newspapers are produced is not new. Many publishers have been thinking about this for quite some time. Some acted on it years ago, not always with fortune. When the New Orleans Times Picayune went from a seven-day-per-week printing schedule to a mere three days in 2012, it marked the beginning of the end for the once proud newspaper that in its golden days two thirds of all households had subscribed to. Portuguese Diario de Noticias from Lisbon went from seven daily editions to just one weekend edition in 2018. Before Corona hit, editor-in-chief Catarina Carvalho had her doubts whether this had been the right strategic move, now she is glad. It may be Diario’s ticket to survival. Only recently, the Tampa Bay Press announced it would cut down printing to the Wednesday and Sunday edition.

This might also be needed as an emergency response. Not only has the corona crisis slashed advertising volume in an already ailing market. But many publishers fear that production and distribution problems could materialise, once illness and restrictions hit personnel and supply chains. And then there is the shortage of cash. As Maria Ressa, the world-famous, award-winning journalist and founder of the digital news platform Rappler.com recently put it in a call: “We have to flatten the curve of expenses.” Apart from chasing facts and protecting staff, making sure the money lasts is a priority now. 

For some publishers, it’s not exaggerated to compare the situation with the ones of doctors in emergency rooms or intensive care units: They would love to keep all the patients alive but have to focus on those with the best chances for survival. The crisis confronts newspapers with life-or-death decisions, media analyst Ken Doctor wrote in a rather gloomy piece for Nieman Lab. First question on the list publishers currently considered in his words: “Will we keep seven days of print publishing?” Buzzfeed reporter Craig Silverman was even more outspoken days before: „The Corona Virus is a Media Extinction Event“, he wrote.

In some markets like Germany the situation looks less strained – at least to the outside world. To the contrary: readers resort to traditional news media in droves when craving the latest information. Those who have to stay home rediscover the ritual of reading print. Some newsrooms even report rising numbers of print subscriptions. But quietly publishers have already reduced page volume and variations in local editions. This is not only because of advertising Armageddon. Apart from corona content that everyone is devouring, there is much less material to fill the pages. Sports competitions and all kinds of culture and business events have been canceled, editors are busy with crisis management, and research is getting difficult, since reporters are advised to keep their risk of exposure to a minimum to not endanger themselves and their families.

In some European media companies, staff is on reduced work schedules – a common government policy to help companies with cost reduction in crisis situations. Even Germany’s most famous political magazine Der Spiegel, known for its generous salaries and working conditions, is apparently considering such a move.  

And once cuts made, reductions are there to stay. It is a hardly guarded secret that readers who cancel print subscriptions do so more often because they feel overwhelmed by too much stuff rather than for receiving too little in volume. In an age of information over-abundance, less is often more. Additionally, publishers will go through great length in the weeks to come to digitally activate their print subscribers, just in case. And once readers are online, they will get used to it. Building habit is the recipe for success in any subscription venture, online or offline. “People are going to spend a lot of time online for the foreseeable future. And so far, we have few examples of people returning to offline media once they have embraced online ones”, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford wrote analysing the situation for the industry.

In many countries, print newspapers won’t disappear from breakfast tables right away. But a sizeable number of publishers will soon count their losses and reduce publishing to just one edition on the weekend. This is when even younger audiences enjoy a slower pace of life, those who haven’t been able to understand the concept of space consuming print editions for some time.

The step from one down to zero will be a short one then. Some people might not even notice in the turbulence of an economic crisis that is likely to stay with us for some time. That is, as long as the journalism survives.

This is what everyone – publishers, governments, platform companies, foundations and funders – should now focus their efforts on. For newsrooms, it is essential to speed up digital transformation and focus on audiences’ needs, the coronavirus-crisis is an excellent opportunity for this. Now quality media are indispensable resources for citizens to inform their daily decisions in times of uncertainty. Platform companies need to keep on their industry support, they have to make sure that it is guided by industry and citizen needs. The fight against misinformation is particularly critical when lives are at stake.  

Emergency funding will be necessary, presumably everywhere.The Danish parliament for example in early April passed a 25 million Euro relief package for the media industry that will compensate for revenues lost through the advertising crisis. Other countries like Austria will follow suit. Journalists themselves will need to keep an eye on whether the distribution of such support will be fair and benefit independent quality journalism. It is well known that many governments use crisis situations as an opportunity to play favourites and get rid of critical voices. 

Being ahead in the digital game used to be a matter of competition. Now rapid and sustainable digital transformation has become a matter of survival. Democracy can live without print. It cannot persevere without strong and independent journalism.

Copyright: Alexandra Borchardt 2020