Delfi Meedia: making AI a newsroom tool

Here’s a figure many of us would love to be able to claim about our own countries: about 21% of the population of Estonia subscribe to Delphi Meedia.

They have what chief AI & innovation officer Ivar Krustok calls “One subs package to rule them all”. This applies across their 12 brands, 4 newspapers, 7 magazines and all the audio and video content. All the subs are monthly — they don’t do annual subs.

“We should be creating a lot of content,” he says. “The goal is to provide everyone with something they care about.”

That translates to:

• 216 articles daily
• 45% of which are behind the paywall

Delphi Media’s AI goals

The company has two goals with its AI rollout:

• Optimising workflows
• Creating long product bets

“GenAI is the rising tide that floats all boats,” says Krustok. By way of an example, he cites the lack of use of their multiple dashboards — he even has a dashboard for dashboard viewers.

“It’s the same for everyone — nobody pays enough attention to them to get insights,” he says. So, for the last eight years they’re been working on a single data store, so they can now access it via a chatbot.

Newsroom adoption

This focus on using AI to make data more accessible emerges in other projects. For example, they also have an archive tool., that allows the journalists to interrogate the entire archive in an AI-assisted way. Automated polls and summaries and translation tools to allow them to quickly move content between the four languages they serve. What’s next? They’re testing a knowledge bot.

Krustok sees the same multi-speed newsroom adoption many have encountered. ”Some editors have problem with the basic CMS, and some are summarising the latest parliamentary session in Notebook LLM,” he says. ”It’s more complex than just giving everyone a ChatGPT subscription. It takes time.”

Some other examples of AI use:

• They’re crawling Estonian court cases as they come in. They’re summarised and pushed to Teams, so the journalists can check them for stories.
• Translation and transcription are the most successful tools — they take a complex and time-consuming task and make it fast and easy.

Q&A Session

• Have they been hit by AI Overviews? “We’ve always had a huge percentage of direct traffic. Losing 60% of Google traffic would hit us, but not stop us. We have a really active user base.”
• How is growth? Growth has slowed down. They’re happy — but it could be better.
• AI personalisation? “It’s not cheap. Is there a really good, cost-efficient way of delivering something for the user?”