Tav Klitgaard: How Zetland turned a newsroom problem into a global AI business

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 product roadmap. It emerged from a familiar newsroom pain point of journalists spending hours transcribing interviews, with existing tools falling short, especially in non-English languages like Danish.

In this conversation, Tav breaks down how GoodTape went from an internal experiment to a standalone, subscription-based product that quickly became profitable, generated millions in revenue and was eventually divested. He also shares what building GoodTape taught Zetland about AI adoption, organizational learning, and where newsrooms should, and shouldn’t, use generative AI.

This episode covers:

05:50 – How a prototype using OpenAI’s Whisper sparked GoodTape

08:36 – The moment Zetland realized GoodTape could be a real product

12:34 – How journalism’s trust and privacy standards became a product advantage

13:59 – What actually improves transcription quality beyond the model itself

15:27 – How GoodTape became profitable and contributed to Zetland’s revenue

16:29 – Why Zetland eventually divested GoodTape instead of scaling it internally

17:36 – What building an AI product taught Zetland about newsroom AI adoption

19:08 – Why Zetland uses AI for productivity, not editorial output

28:14 – A real-world example of AI use that forced Zetland to rethink its own guidelines

30:34 – Why principles matter more than rigid AI rules in newsrooms

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