This episode of Newsroom Robots is supported by The Lenfest Institute for Journalism.
For most of journalism’s history, the article has been the atomic unit of news: a fixed container, written once and served the same way to everyone. That’s beginning to change. AI is moving out from behind the scenes, where it quietly powered efficiencies, and into the interface itself, where it can assemble, personalize, and adapt the news to each reader.
On this week’s episode of Newsroom Robots, I speak with Jim Friedlich, Executive Director and CEO of The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, and Kevin Delaney, Editor-in-Chief of The San Francisco Standard. Kevin is one of the most consistent product innovators in our industry. He was previously co-founder and editor-in-chief of Quartz, where he reimagined what mobile-first news could feel like, and co-founder and CEO of Charter, the future-of-work media company acquired by The San Francisco Standard.
Earlier this year, The Standard became a part of the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program, funded by OpenAI and Microsoft. As part of the program, it received a grant to build a genuinely AI-native news app, where the article isn’t the building block anymore. Instead, the raw materials are atomic like a quote, a piece of data, a few lines of reporting, all assembled by AI into an experience that adapts to each reader. It’s one of the first examples I’ve seen of a U.S. newsroom beginning to build “liquid content” end to end.
Jim lays out Lenfest’s framing of where the industry is heading: a shift from mode one (efficiency, process improvements, the everyday wins) to mode two (reinventing the reader-facing product itself). Both matter. But as Kevin says, newsrooms wake up every day living in mode one, and mode two only happens when someone deliberately funds the time, focus, and permission to imagine the news interface of the future. Lenfest’s funding is enabling that.
In this episode, we get into what it means to give AI a role in the interface without surrendering editorial identity, how to keep accuracy and transparency at the center, and why both Kevin and Jim insist that the future is humans in the lead, not just in the loop.
In this episode, we cover:
01:47 — What “AI-native” actually means, and the three areas where AI is uniquely good
04:56 — “Personalized obsessions” — why readers follow stories, not sections and the app’s early results
10:00 — Kevin’s “news as farming” analogy
12:36 — Jim walks through the reader experience of the app
15:33 — The shift from Mode One to Mode Two and how the Lenfest AI Collaborative’s thinking has evolved
26:34 — Atomic content and the reporter’s CMS: unlocking the interviews, notes, and quotes that never make the 800-word article
42:48 — How they control for accuracy by grounding AI in their own journalism
50:28 — Everyday newsroom wins, from a sports contract calculator to “find me a juicy story” in a document dump
🎧 Listen to the full conversation with Jim Friedlich and Kevin Delaney on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your preferred podcast platform.
