A small Norwegian newsroom punches above its weight with a data-driven, human-centred AI strategy

A few years ago, iTromsø – a 25-reporter newsroom in northern Norway – realised it was losing the news race to its local competitor.

“For every story we had one person on, they had four or five,” said Lars Adrian Giske, the newspaper’s Head of AI at our recent Paris AI Forum.

To regain its competitive edge, iTromsø turned to data. The team decided to focus on uncovering original stories hidden in public data using self-developed tools.

The result was a platform that scans municipal archives and ranks them for newsworthiness. Reporters once spent hours trawling through these files, but now they can find leads in minutes.

When iTromsø presented its new tool to its owner, Polaris Media, the media group wanted to roll out similar tools in its 70-plus newsrooms in Norway and Sweden. The structure it came up with for this stays true to the group's 'federated' model, in which each newsroom has a high level of independence.

Polaris Media now runs five regional AI labs, each embedded in a local newsroom and connected through a central AI & Product Forum.

This model blends “bottom-up creativity, central coordination and top-down alignment,” said Giske. It lets local teams experiment, while Polaris provides the shared infrastructure to scale up what works.

As for iTromsø, the new approach and tools have helped the small newsroom to get back in the race.

“We started out missing out on stories and being beaten by our competition,” Giske said. “Now we have more good story ideas than we know what to do with.”

Read the full article.

• Read also our key takeaways from the Paris AI Forum and the five themes that define the media–AI conversation in 2025.

India’s digital media leaders on bridging print and digital: ‘We are guardians of trust as much as our print colleagues are’

At WAN‑IFRA’s Indian Printers Summit, industry leaders outlined how publishers are moving away from chasing scale and towards building loyalty through subscription bundles, newsletters and other retention-focused products.

Print and digital now play complementary roles: print provides authority and habit, while digital delivers speed, reach and personalisation.

The key is practicing “velocity journalism,” which balances speed with verification, as well as transparent, practical uses of AI – from fact‑checking to multilingual automation.

Read the full article.

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