Fabian Heckenberg, Naja Nielsen & Gard Steiro: The Hard Truths About AI Every Newsroom Leader Can’t Ignore (Recorded Live at Nordic AI in Media Summit 2025)
In this engaging discussion, Gard Steiro, Editor-in-Chief and CEO of VG, emphasizes the need for open dialogue about AI's role in newsrooms. Naja Nielsen, Media Director at SVT, highlights the significance of empowering experimentation and organizational learning. Fabian Heckenberg from Süddeutsche Zeitung shares insights on forming interdisciplinary teams and tackling prioritization challenges in the face of legacy systems versus new AI tools. Together, they explore the transformative potential of AI in journalism while ensuring trust and relevance with audiences.
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insights INSIGHT
Managing AI Uncertainty with Dialogue
Focus on actionable newsroom discussions amid AI uncertainty.
Embrace openness to create solutions for unpredictable AI futures.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Empower Experiments and Teams
Empower organizational learning through leadership and experimentation.
Avoid centralizing decisions; include interdisciplinary teams and involve public feedback.
insights INSIGHT
Cross-Functional Newsroom Integration
Tech, editorial, and product teams need deeper integration and mutual understanding.
Business development involvement inside newsrooms remains a critical challenge.
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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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