17 June | Zoom at 15:00 CEST / 09:00 EDT
How iTromsø built a data gathering tool which allows it to supercharge its local investigative journalism
Speaker: Rune Ytreberg, Data Editor at Mediehuset iTromsø, Norway
Moderator: Cecilia Campbell, Innovate Local Programme Editor, WAN-IFRA Sweden
iTromsø is a 22-person newsroom in northern Norway. It had a two-pronged problem: journalists were spending hours wading through municipal documents every day, all while competing with another local larger newsroom – for stories as well as readers. The solution was to build DJINN, a tool that automatically monitors public data sources, ranks documents by newsworthiness, and flags story leads for journalists to pursue. That frees up time for journalists to call sources, and work the stories that the tool surfaces. Now the team has gone further, building a layered system of agents and sub-agents that actively supports complex local investigations, with editorial supervision at every step. In this webinar we’ll learn how the iTromsø team built a tool to solve a clear editorial problem and how AI agents are allowing this small team to cover even more and deeper investigative stories.