The Newsroom AI Catalyst is an accelerator programme sponsored by OpenAI, the AI research and deployment company behind ChatGPT. FATHM, the London media lab and news consultancy pilots the programme under the coaching of Fergus Bell, Tom Trewinnard and their team: “The Newsroom AI Catalyst is a peerless opportunity for newsrooms worldwide to take concrete steps toward harnessing AI’s transformative power to enhance their work. We’re thrilled to collaborate with WAN-IFRA and OpenAI”, say Bell and Trewinnard.
Topic experts and fellow publishers from various parts of the world contribute to the programme, offering guidance to the teams. The official kick-off of the second European catalyst took place in Lisbon on 14/15 of January 2025. Each participating publisher has assembled a multidisciplinary team for a 3-month accelerator programme.
Carsten Groß, CEO of Mediaholding South in Germany, considers participation in the program as “a fantastic opportunity to bring one of our ideas to life with a productivity boost. Additionally, we are further training our teams for our AI journey and can draw further inspiration for our AI roadmap through the strong network of all participating publishers.”
“It is a great opportunity to have access to training to understand how to implement AI in the newsroom with a transversal working group,” says Clara Soteras, Head of Innovation and Digital Strategy at AMIC in Spain. “When we think about AI and journalism, we think about how to develop technical parts, but what is essential is to create a product that provides value to the user and makes sense at a business level, taking advantage of the capabilities and opportunities of artificial intelligence. I am sure it will provide us with a fundamental work methodology, adding technical, commercial and digital strategy roles to develop a correct implementation of AI and create an interesting product for the audience.”
“Collaborating with other leading media companies as part of the AI Catalyst enables us to learn from each other, expand our knowledge and jointly develop sustainable, responsible AI use cases for media companies. At the same time, we can also contribute to the further development of the media industry in the digital age.” commented Felix Langenmayr, Head of Business Transformation at 20minuten in Switzerland.
And Julia Onyshchenko Christensen, Customer and Product Director at Det Nordjyske Mediehus in Denmark sees her team “driven by a clear ambition: to explore and embrace the transformative potential of AI in reshaping the future of regional journalism. AI offers us unparalleled opportunities to enhance the way we process and analyze vast amounts of information, empowering us to deliver more relevant, timely, and insightful content in the context of our region.” “We aim to accelerate our ability to harness AI not only to improve our internal workflows but also to innovate in areas such as citizen journalism and user-generated content, making the news ecosystem more inclusive and participatory,” she added.
The first European Catalyst saw 16 teams from 10 countries develop AI-related prototypes for their newsrooms. The list of projects included an archive search assistant, an AI-automated context tool for the writing process, a text-to-podcast tool, an AI-powered workflow that posts and drafts content into a CMS and an AI proofreading tool. Other initiatives of the first cohort were an AI tool for parsing and embedding documents, a chatbot for planning activities on the weekend, an AI engine to query data and an AI assistant for the editorial process. The teams also made considerable progress in building a web-to-print assistant, an AI-guide for an annual cultural program, an AI search assistant for readers, a tool for shortening texts and an AI-based web and SEO optimization.
“The range of ideas for projects in the first catalyst was mindblowing,” says Martin Fröhlich, director of the Digital Network at WAN-IFRA. “It shows that the publishers are ready and inspired to seize the opportunities of Artificial Intelligence to improve their workflows and products.”
The news organisations participating in the second Newsroom AI Catalyst Europe are:
20 minuten (Switzerland)
AMIC – L’Associació de Mitjans d’Informació i Comunicació (Spain)
ARA (Spain)
Deco pro Teste (Portugal)
La Depeche du Midi (France)
Det Nordjyske Mediehus (Denmark)
EBRA Groupe (France)
Impresa (Portugal)
Interia Group (Poland)
El Nacional (Spain)
Neue Westfälische Zeitung (Germany)
OUR Media (Slovakia)
Le Quotidien Jurasien (Switzerland)
SH:Z (Germany)
SWMH – Sued West Media Holding (Germany)
Saarbrücker Zeitung / Trierischerer Volksfreund / Bonner Generalanzeiger (Germany)
Vocento (Spain)
Timeline 2025
January: Call for applications in South Asia and Latin America. Second accelerator starts in Europe.
March to May: Completion of the second accelerator in Europe and first in South Asia and Latin America.
June: Call for applications for a second accelerator in Asia Pacific, South Asia and Latin America.
August: Selection and notification of participants.
September to November: Completion of the second accelerator in Asia Pacific, South Asia and Latin America.
CONTACT – INQUIRIES
For more information, interviews or to make contact with participants, please contact Martin Fröhlich, Director, Digital Revenue Network, WAN-IFRA martin.froehlich@wan-ifra.org
ABOUT WAN-IFRA. WAN-IFRA is the World Association of News Publishers. Its mission is to protect the rights of journalists and publishers around the world to operate independent media. WAN-IFRA provides its members with expertise and services to innovate and prosper in a digital world and perform their crucial role in society. With formal representative status at the United Nations, UNESCO and the Council of Europe, it derives its authority from its global network of leading news publishing companies and technology entrepreneurs, and its legitimacy from its 80 national association members representing 18,000 publications in 120 countries.
ABOUT OPENAI. OpenAI, an American AI research organisation headquartered in San Francisco, California. Its mission is to create safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence (AGI), described as “highly autonomous systems that surpass human performance in most economically valuable tasks.” As a prominent player in the AI industry, OpenAI is renowned for its GPT series of large language models, the DALL-E series of text-to-image models, and a text-to-video model called Sora. The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 significantly heightened global interest in generative AI. The organisation is composed of the non-profit OpenAI, Inc., registered in Delaware, and its for-profit subsidiary, OpenAI Global, LLC, established in 2019. Microsoft holds approximately 49% of OpenAI’s equity.
