2025 wasn’t just another year of AI experimentation in the media industry. It forced us to confront a bigger question: what happens when AI stops being just a newsroom tool and becomes the layer audiences experience journalism through?
That’s the question I keep coming back to as we head into 2026, because the stakes are shifting fast. AI is reshaping distribution, workflows, trust and the economics of publishing all at once.
On this episode of Newsroom Robots, I’m joined by Francesco Marconi and Scott Austin for a candid, high-signal conversation about what 2025 really changed for AI and news, the trends that flew under the radar, and our predictions heading into 2026.
Francesco is the co-founder and CEO of AppliedXL. Before that, he led R&D at The Wall Street Journal. Earlier in his career, he built some of the earliest AI and newsroom automation systems at The Associated Press. If you’ve been listening for a while, you might remember him from his previous appearance on the Newsroom Robots podcast back in 2023. You can revisit that episode here.
Scott leads business development at Symbolic.ai, an AI-assisted publishing tool. He is also a journalist and digital media veteran who spent years at The Wall Street Journal as a reporter and award-winning editor, leading teams that covered some of the biggest tech stories of the decade. He later led content partnerships at Dow Jones, working across major platforms and partners.
The three of us have also been collaborating on our upcoming book, The Science of First, coming out in 2026. Working on it has kept us immersed in the biggest questions about how news organizations survive and compete in an AI-mediated information ecosystem, even as the industry continues to shift in real time.
In this episode, we cover:
03:10 – Why 2025 was journalism’s operational reckoning year
08:55 – The shift from search to answers, and why it breaks old business models
14:40 – Proactive AI, and what ChatGPT Pulse reveals about the next distribution layer
20:30 – Journalism’s hidden work: why persistence, source building, and human judgment still matter
23:30 – Why news orgs must move upstream, from content to structured knowledge
36:10 – AI agents: what they actually are, what they are not, and why transparency matters
41:20 – The overlooked shift: Model Context Protocol (MCP), and why it is a major newsroom disruption
51:05 – Our predictions for 2026
🎧 Listen to the full conversation with Francesco Marconi and Scott Austin on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your preferred podcast platform.
