In this episode, host Nikita Roy is joined by Sara Beykpour, co-founder and CEO of Particle News — the AI-powered news aggregator. Launched in November 2024, Particle blends multi-perspective coverage, concise AI-generated summaries, and a bias meter that makes framing visible, giving readers both speed and trust in the same experience.

Key topics include:

• How Particle’s “Reality Check” process works using multi-source input and verification passes to minimize hallucinations and produce more accurate summaries.
• Strategies Particle uses to maintain reader trust in an era when AI-generated summaries can quickly erode it.
• How Particle surfaces bias with a meter that shows how coverage leans left, right, or center and updates as stories develop.
• The role of topic-based personalization in avoiding filter bubbles while still giving readers tailored news feeds.

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What if the future of journalism isn’t locked behind the paywalls of big tech companies, but freely available to every newsroom willing to embrace it?

Too often, the conversation around AI in newsrooms centers on big tech, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini. These are powerful tools, no doubt but they come with caveats: mainly cost, limited transparency, and little to no control over where your data ends up.

But there’s another world of AI rapidly evolving in parallel and it might be journalism’s best path forward: open-source AI.

In this episode of Newsroom Robots, host Nikita Roy reconnects with returning guest Florent Daudens, now the Press Lead at Hugging Face, one of the leading platforms powering open source AI. Formerly a newsroom leader driving AI integration at Canada’s Radio-Canada, Florent now sits at the heart of the open source AI movement.

Key topics include:

• Why open source AI matters for journalism and how it compares to proprietary models
• The rise of AI agents and what they mean for editorial control and user experience
• How compressed, privacy-first models running on laptops and phones could change the game
• The environmental cost of AI and how newsrooms can make more sustainable tech choices
• What news apps might look like in an agent-powered future
• How newsrooms can start experimenting with open source AI (no dev team required)

Plus, Florent shares 20 must-know open source AI tools for journalists, explains how writing is building in the age of AI, and discusses why owning the experience, not just the content, will be key to journalism’s survival

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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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