2025 wasn’t just another year of AI experimentation in the media industry. It forced the industry to confront a bigger question: what happens when AI stops being just a newsroom tool and becomes the layer audiences experience journalism through? That is the core question heading into 2026.

This week on Newsroom Robots, host Nikita Roy sits down with Francesco Marconi and Scott Austin for an end of year recap roundtable on what actually changed in AI and media in 2025 and what newsroom leaders need to prepare for heading into 2026.

Francesco is the co-founder and CEO of AppliedXL. He previously led R&D at The Wall Street Journal and built some of the earliest AI and newsroom automation systems at The Associated Press.

Scott leads business development at Symbolic.ai, an AI assisted publishing tool. He is also a journalist and digital media veteran who spent years at The Wall Street Journal as a reporter and award winning editor, and later led content partnerships at Dow Jones across major platforms.

This episode covers:

03:10 — Why 2025 was journalism’s operational reckoning year

08:55 — The shift from search to answers and why it breaks old business models

14:40 — Proactive AI and what ChatGPT Pulse reveals about the next distribution layer

20:30 — Journalism’s hidden work and why persistence, source building, and human judgment still matter

23:30 — Why news orgs must move upstream from content to structured knowledge

36:10 — AI agents: what they actually are, what they are not, and why transparency matters

41:20 — The overlooked shift: Model Context Protocol (MCP) and why it is a major newsroom disruption

51:05 — Predictions for 2026

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