Zach Seward, Editorial Director of AI Initiatives at The New York Times and co-founder of Quartz, discusses the innovative strides AI is making in journalism. He shares how his five-person AI team supports investigative work by analyzing massive data sets. The conversation highlights their in-house tool, Echo, which streamlines article transformation for reporters. Zach emphasizes the importance of trust and agency in the newsroom, as well as how AI enhances reader engagement and reshapes audience interactions with news.
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Building The NYT AI Team
Zach Seward formed a five-person AI team at The New York Times shortly after starting in late 2023.
The team combined journalism expertise with machine learning and design to create AI tools for the newsroom.
insights INSIGHT
Three-Focus AI Strategy
The NYT AI initiatives focus on three areas: investigative research, internal workflows, and enhancing reader experiences.
Prioritizing these areas balances immediate newsroom impact with long-term innovation.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Prioritize Journalist Agency
Design AI tools that let journalists edit and understand prompts to maintain agency.
Empowering users with transparency encourages trust and effective tool use.
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In this live episode, host Nikita Roy sits down with Zach Seward, Editorial Director of AI Initiatives at The New York Times, recorded at the ONA x Newsroom Robots AI Leadership Summit in Detroit. With a background that spans journalism, product, and executive leadership, Zach brings a rare blend of newsroom insight and entrepreneurial thinking to the challenges of this AI era. Before joining the Times, he co-founded Quartz, where he served as editor-in-chief, CEO, and chief product officer, helping to pioneer digital-native journalism.
Now at The Times, he’s built a new editorial AI team from the ground up, experimenting with tooling, guiding newsroom adoption, and thinking through what comes next in how journalism is produced, distributed, and consumed.
Key topics include:
How the Times is using AI to support investigations, including analyzing hundreds of hours of leaked video and massive public data sets using custom LLM workflows.
Echo, the in-house summarization tool that’s helping reporters transform articles, headlines, and tags across a range of newsroom needs.
Lessons from building a five-person AI team inside a 2,000-person newsroom and why newsroom trust and individual agency are central to successful adoption.
Why Zach’s team sees itself as an “AI enablement” group and how their newsroom-wide roadshow has sparked experimentation.
The role of AI in reader experiences, from improving internal search to exploring voice interfaces that reimagine how audiences interact with journalism.
What it means to build durable, future-ready news products in a media environment increasingly shaped by AI distribution and personalization systems.
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