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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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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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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