AI is settling in as infrastructure within newsrooms, a layer quietly reshaping how journalists discover information, how stories move through production, and how audiences increasingly expect news to reach them.

In this episode of Newsroom Robots, recorded live in New York City at TV News Check’s News Tech Forum, host Nikita Roy brings together four industry leaders to examine the tangible ways AI is transforming newsroom operations. The conversation features Ryan Struyk, Director of AI Initiatives at CNN; Rubina Madan Fillion, Associate Editorial Director of AI Initiatives at The New York Times; Arlyn Gajilan, Global Editor of AI Development and Integration at Reuters; and Burt Herman, Co-Founder and Principal of Hacks/Hackers.

The discussion focuses on defining questions for the news industry: Where is AI already delivering real operational impact? How should newsrooms adapt to a world of “liquid content” and AI-mediated distribution? Is human-in-the-loop governance sustainable, or is it already breaking down? As trust in news declines and trust in AI interfaces rises, what becomes journalism’s true competitive advantage?

In this episode, they cover:

03:10 — Where AI is already embedded inside CNN’s newsroom workflows

04:25 — How The New York Times uses AI to power investigative reporting and the “Manosphere Report”

07:30 — How Reuters compressed story production from minutes to seconds and feature development from three months to three weeks

11:44 — Why Hacks/Hackers is urging small newsrooms to think from first principles before adopting AI

15:15 — The rise of liquid content and what it means when audiences reshape journalism into their preferred formats

23:24 — Why local news holds a unique advantage in an AI-mediated information landscape

29:12 — Five years from now: What newsrooms hope they get right

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Most major newsrooms have now moved beyond early experimentation with AI. The main challenge now is determining how to govern effectively, scale consistently, and strategically position AI across the entire organization—while maintaining public trust as a central priority.

This week on Newsroom Robots, host Nikita Roy sits down with Uli Köppen, Chief AI Officer at Bavarian Broadcasting (BR), to talk about what it really looks like to lead AI strategy inside one of Europe’s largest public broadcasting networks.

Uli makes a compelling case for why every newsroom should establish a dedicated AI leadership function, backed by an interdisciplinary governance structure. They also dig into a question defining the next phase of AI strategy for many newsrooms: in a world of AI overviews, zero-click search, and agent-driven information retrieval, how do you maintain your brand as a recognizable, trustworthy source? Uli shares why BR opted out of AI crawling and what they are building instead, including a vision for a verified content data pool that could power new products across multiple media organizations.

In this episode, they cover:

02:09 — What it means to be Chief AI Officer at a public broadcaster

06:30 — Why every newsroom needs an interdisciplinary AI board, not just a single AI leader

09:06 — The skills newsrooms need to build for an AI-driven environment

11:00 — Why reinventing workflows starts before adding any technology

16:28 — Inside the Oktoberfest Chatbot and the collaborative content pool powering it

23:40 — Using AI for smarter community engagement and real-time moderation

26:30 — The personalized audio news briefing that users love and where it’s headed

36:00 — How BR’s AI guidelines evolved from broad guardrails to clear, example-based rules

41:40 — The strategic question: be part of AI platforms, or build recognizable products of your own?

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Chicago Public Media operates two distinct news brands: WBEZ, the public radio station, and the Chicago Sun-Times, the legacy newspaper. With audio and print journalism, both membership and advertising revenue, and decades of archives in multiple formats, they're a unique case study for AI in local news.

When CEO Melissa Bell joined the organization, there was interest in AI but no dedicated resources for experimentation. Through the Lenfest AI Collaborative, they brought in their first AI engineer. A year later, Spanish translations that used to take days are now published the same day. Forty years of WBEZ audio, previously unsearchable, are being transcribed and made searchable for journalists.

In this week's episode, host Nikita Roy speaks with Chicago Public Media leaders Melissa Bell (CEO) and Aron Pilhofer (Chief Product and Membership Officer), along with Mark Chonowsky (AI Fellow) and David Chivers (lead AI advisor for the Lenfest AI Collaborative).

A note on this week's episode

David Chivers, who listeners will hear in this episode, passed away on January 1, 2026. He was the lead advisor for the Lenfest AI Collaborative and this episode was recorded the previous month. David was deeply committed to building capability in newsrooms. He was generous with his time, sharp in his insights, and always had one of those big smiles that would light up a room. He will be missed.

The conversation covers how Chicago Public Media is thinking about AI as part of a larger membership strategy, how they decide what to build versus buy with limited resources, and what it looks like to lead through a public AI failure.

In this episode:

02:55 — Where Chicago Public Media started with AI a year ago

08:08 — What AI use looks like inside the newsroom

15:42 — How product development is evolving with AI tools

27:28 — Collaboration with OpenAI and Microsoft

28:26 — How AI fits into Chicago Public Media's membership strategy

36:05 — Build vs. buy with limited resources

37:44 — The Chicago Sun-Times AI-generated book list incident

42:18 — Advice for leaders navigating AI mistakes publicly

This episode of Newsroom Robots is supported by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.

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