What happens when a newsroom turns an internal AI solution into a global business?
That is exactly what happened at Zetland, a Danish audio-first newsroom whose internal transcription fix evolved into GoodTape, a global AI business.
This week on Newsroom Robots, I sit down with Tav Klitgaard, CEO of Zetland, to unpack the origin story of GoodTape, an AI transcription tool that began as an internal newsroom solution and grew into a profitable product used far beyond journalism.
GoodTape was not born from an AI strategy or a product roadmap. It emerged from a familiar newsroom pain point. Journalists were spending hours transcribing interviews, and existing tools fell short, especially in non English languages like Danish.
In our conversation, Tav breaks down how GoodTape went from an internal experiment to a standalone, subscription based product that quickly became profitable, generated millions in revenue, and was eventually divested. We also get into what building GoodTape taught Zetland about AI adoption, organizational learning, and where newsrooms should and should not use generative AI.
In this episode, we cover:
05:50 – How a prototype using OpenAI’s Whisper sparked GoodTape
08:36 – The moment Zetland realized GoodTape could be a real product
12:34 – How journalism’s trust and privacy standards became a product advantage
13:59 – What actually improves transcription quality beyond the model itself
15:27 – How GoodTape became profitable and contributed to Zetland’s revenue
17:36 – What building an AI product taught Zetland about newsroom AI adoption
28:14 – A real-world example of AI use that forced Zetland to rethink its own guidelines
30:34 – Why principles matter more than rigid AI rules in newsrooms
🎧 Listen to the full conversation with Tav Klitgaard on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
