AI is settling in as infrastructure within newsrooms, a layer quietly reshaping how journalists discover information, how stories move through production, and how audiences increasingly expect news to reach them.
In this episode of Newsroom Robots, recorded live in New York City at TV News Check’s News Tech Forum, I brought together four industry leaders to examine the tangible ways AI is transforming newsroom operations. The conversation featured Ryan Struyk, Director of AI Initiatives at CNN, Rubina Madan Fillion, Associate Editorial Director of AI Initiatives at The New York Times, Arlyn Gajilan, Global Editor of AI Development and Integration at Reuters and Burt Herman, Co-Founder and Principal of Hacks/Hackers.
Despite representing fundamentally different newsroom models—broadcast, digital subscription, wire service, and local news—they came together to confront common questions about where their industry is headed.
The discussion focused on defining questions for the news industry: Where is AI already delivering real operational impact? How should newsrooms adapt to a world of “liquid content” and AI-mediated distribution? Is human-in-the-loop governance sustainable, or is it already breaking down? As trust in news declines and trust in AI interfaces rises, what becomes journalism’s true competitive advantage?
In this episode, we cover:
03:10 — Where AI is already embedded inside CNN’s newsroom workflows
04:25 — How The New York Times uses AI to power investigative reporting and the “Manosphere Report”
7:30 — How Reuters compressed story production from minutes to seconds and feature development from three months to three weeks
11:44 — Why Hacks/Hackers is urging small newsrooms to think from first principles before adopting AI
15:15 — The rise of liquid content and what it means when audiences reshape journalism into their preferred formats
23:24 — Why local news holds a unique advantage in an AI-mediated information landscape
29:12 — Five years from now: What newsrooms hope they get right
🎧 Listen to the full conversation with Ryan Struyk, Rubina Madan Fillion, Arlyn Gajilan, and Burt Herman on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.
