When it comes to innovating with AI in the newsroom, Schibsted, a media group based in Oslo, shows the world what publishers can do (see this story). Among their innovations is creating an LLM for media in Norway. In an episode of AI Inside’s podcast, Jeff Jarvis states: “Schibsted is, and I do not exaggerate, the most admired news company and cause of the most jealousy in the news industry in the world because they’ve been successful and they figured out the internet better than any other company I know of online.”
I caught up with Aftonbladet’s Martin Schori in June, a few days after the EU elections. Martin is deputy managing editor for Aftonbladet, one of Schibsted’s legacy media outlets in Sweden. I was particularly curious about their chatbot, Valkompisen, launched after an internal hackathon for the elections to provide fact-checked answers about the elections to their users. Leveraging AI for elections proved to be a good bet, driving a significant amount of engagement.
