From new formats to membership growth: How newsrooms across four continents are harnessing AI to transform journalism
Artificial intelligence is opening unprecedented opportunities for newsrooms worldwide, from generating content in multiple formats to driving audience engagement and revenue growth. Join us for a conversation showcasing real-world AI implementations from India, Indonesia, South Africa, and the Philippines, where innovation is being driven by necessity and creativity, not just resources.
Discover how innovative media organizations are using AI to scale their news production, analyze massive datasets, boost membership models, and reimagine storytelling, all while maintaining journalistic integrity and serving their communities.
Panel Speakers:
Sannuta Raghu | Head of AI Lab, Scroll.in (India)
Sannuta Raghu is an award-winning Indian journalist and television producer who heads Scroll.in’s AI Lab for News and Journalism. With her colleagues, she is building Factivo, a versioning platform to repurpose text news articles into formats and interfaces according to the information needs of users. Her work in AI implementation emphasizes creating workflows which are ‘fidelity-to-source’ and ‘fidelity-to-fact.’ Since 2016, she has built, shaped and scaled Scroll.in’s digital video newsroom, creating news products for platforms with 6 million to 200 million users. Sannuta is a Journalist Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford, and an ICFJ Knight Fellow.
Arkka Dhiratara | CEO, Hukumonline.com (Indonesia)
Arkka Dhiratara is the Chief Executive Officer of Hukumonline, Indonesia’s largest legal database provider and technology-based regulatory platform. He joined Hukumonline in 2018 as CTO, where he introduced modern software development practices and led the technology transformation of the company. Previously, Arkka served as Lead Software Engineer at the President’s Delivery Unit for Development Monitoring and Oversight, where he led the development of various government-wide information systems. In 2019, he became Indonesia Founding Ambassador at ASEAN LegalTech, a platform that promotes and builds the LegalTech ecosystem. He holds a Master of Science in Computer Science from Delft University of Technology.
Fran Beighton | Head of Growth, Daily Maverick (South Africa)
Fran Beighton is Head of Growth at Daily Maverick in South Africa, where she oversees over 70% of the revenue efforts including membership, grant and philanthropic funding, the live journalism division, e-commerce and the book publishing division. During her six years with the publication, Fran and her team have grown the membership base to 32,000 members from a starting base of 200, launched numerous new divisions, and have been the grateful recipients of multiple national and international awards. Daily Maverick’s membership model now accounts for over 40% of overall revenue.
Jaemark Tordecilla | Journalist & AI Media Advisor (Philippines)
Jaemark Tordecilla is a journalist, media advisor, and technologist from the Philippines focusing on AI and newsroom innovation. He was a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University in 2024 and his work on building AI tools for newsrooms in developing countries has been featured by the Reuters Institute and the Computational Journalism Lab at Northwestern University. He spent nearly a decade as editor-in-chief and head of digital media for GMA News, the Philippines’ leading digital news organization, where he oversaw all online publishing and audience development activities and founded the network’s Digital Video Lab. In 2021, Tordecilla won a TOYM Award, one of the Philippines’ top honors for young civic leaders, for his work in digital journalism.
Moderator:
Ezra Eeman | AI in Media Expert, WAN-IFRA
Ezra Eeman is the Director of Strategy & Innovation at NPO, the Dutch Public Broadcaster. Ezra has almost 20 years of experience in media, innovation and journalism. Previously he was Change Director at international media company Mediahuis, responsible for coordinating newsroom transformation and digital acceleration. He worked as the Head of Digital, Transformation and Platforms at the EBU, The European Broadcasting Union and before that was head of an innovation lab and journalist at VRT, the Flemish public broadcaster.
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The webinar will be held in English on Zoom and recorded for internal reference. The recording and webinar content, including presentations, will be available on the WAN-IFRA Knowledge Hub, the premier online resource exclusively for WAN-IFRA members.
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