#7. Weekly AI for Newsroom Round Up is back

Hello, it’s Sergei.

It’s been a couple of months since the last newsletter, but we’re getting back into a steady rhythm again (with new design and update Chat that is now available for everyone).

Last week I was in Riga for the 10th anniversary of the Baltic Center for Media Excellence. We ran a hackathon for local newsrooms — in two days, teams from Latvian regional media built four working projects — and the celebration wrapped with a conference filled with sharp people and honest conversations.

One discussion stuck with me. While talking with Ole Reissmann about the state of AI in news media, we kept coming back to the same point: the tools are ready, but the infrastructure isn’t. The current generation of AI models is good enough for editorial workflows (to some extent), but building or deeply integrating them still depends on an AI infrastructure that’s very basic. And that gap hits small newsrooms the hardest. Without proper tools or engineering capacity, most of them end up relying on chat-based systems like ChatGPT or Claude — useful, yes, but far from real integration.