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.
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Kevin Delaney & Jim Friedlich: How The San Francisco Standard is Reinventing the News App
Host Nikita Roy interviews Jim Friedlich, CEO of The Lenfest Institute, and Kevin Delaney, Editor-in-Chief of The San Francisco Standard, about reinventing news apps with AI-native, personalized content.
12 Apr 2026TRANSCRIPT
Kati Erwert & Tristan Loper: How The Seattle Times uses AI to drive revenue in local news
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 developed a prospecting agent. This tool enables sales representatives to enter a category or focus area, identify businesses spending in that market, find decision-makers, access advertising spend data, and generate personalized outreach.
The Seattle Times deliberately began its AI efforts in advertising rather than the newsroom. Early successes helped build momentum across the organization. This led to listening tours across finance, HR, and eventually the newsroom, where a municipal meeting listening tool is now in development.
This week on Newsroom Robots, host Nikita Roy speaks with Kati Erwert, Senior VP of Product Marketing and Public Service at The Seattle Times, and Tristan Loper, Head of National Programs at the Lenfest Institute, to explore how the prospecting agent works, why starting in advertising was key to unlocking organization-wide adoption, and what it takes to turn early AI successes into lasting capability.
In this episode:
02:07 — How The Seattle Times built internal momentum for AI adoption
05:51 — What the Lenfest AI Collaborative is and how it works
09:29 — Inside the prospecting agent: how a sales rep closed business in one day
14:11 — Why starting with advertising drove cultural change across the organization
17:07 — The buy vs. build decision in a fast-moving AI landscape
19:03 — How open-source code sharing works across the 11-newsroom cohort
24:44 — Building the municipal meeting listening tool and beyond
37:07 — Navigating the tension of blocking AI bots
45:47 — How smaller newsrooms can get started with AI today
This episode of Newsroom Robots is supported by The Lenfest Institute for Journalism (https://www.lenfestinstitute.org/).
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13 Mar 2026TRANSCRIPT
Kat Downs Mulder: Inside Yahoo’s AI Strategy for the Future of News
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 platform is layering AI across every surface of a product that reaches an estimated 180 million people in the U.S. alone each month. Kat previously spent more than 14 years at The Washington Post as chief product officer and managing editor before taking on the challenge of modernizing one of the internet's original news destinations.
The conversation explores Yahoo's acquisition of Artifact, the AI news app built by Instagram's co-founders, which gave the platform a new recommendation engine that prioritizes time spent reading over clicks. It also digs into Yahoo Scout, the company's new AI answer engine that synthesizes information with rich citations and visual context, and an AI-powered daily audio digest designed to turn personalized news into a listening habit. Each of these products makes Yahoo more useful to its audience, but each also changes the relationship between Yahoo and the publishers whose journalism powers the platform.
When an answer engine can deliver what a user needs without a click-through, when an audio digest summarizes a story so well the article never gets opened, and when personalization makes the aggregator the destination instead of the pass-through, the old economics stop working for publishers. Kat is candid that the compensation models haven't been figured out yet, noting that Yahoo is working with the Microsoft Publisher Content Marketplace to develop new frameworks, but that the industry is still writing those rules in real time.
She makes a strong case for how Yahoo is approaching this differently, from how Scout prominently surfaces publishers to the rev-share model they operate, and why she believes the quality flywheel they are building actually rewards better journalism. Kat argues that original, distinctive journalism will become more valuable in an AI world because AI agents will seek out what is unique.
This episode covers:
03:20 — Why Yahoo acquired Artifact and how it shifted recommendation algorithms
06:20 — The shift from click-based metrics to deeper engagement signals such as session time and retention
08:50 — Inside Yahoo Scout, Yahoo's new AI answer engine built to support publishers and the open web
12:40 — The changing economics of news as AI platforms begin generating answers instead of sending traffic
17:40 — Yahoo's personalized AI-generated audio news digest and why multimodal news experiences matter
22:00 — How Yahoo's editorial and AI teams collaborate on quality control at scale
31:00 — How AI is transforming newsroom product development and prototyping
36:10 — The tension between personalization and journalism's civic responsibility
40:00 — What smaller newsrooms can learn from their AI product playbook
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Inside a recent episode
Kevin Delaney & Jim Friedlich: How The San Francisco Standard is Reinventing the News App
Published 30 May 2026 · Transcript excerpt
[…] What I should say very clearly is that we believe that our future is... rooted in human journalism. Like this is externalism that has perspective, that has proximity, that shares the experience with people who live in a place like San Francisco. And I have a lot of confidence that that specific thing is not replaceable by AI for a long time to come. And that the narrative stories that we write and the investigative reporting that we do, all will be aided by AI tools, but will be fundamentally human driven and directed and written and not actually be impacted by AI or undermined by AI in a way that I don't have the same confidence that other types of journalism actually feel more vulnerable to it than the sort of work that we're doing and we're doubling down on. […]
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