World’s First AI-Generated Newspaper! - When Tech Meets Journalism
This Week in Products, we dive into the Il Foglio, an Italian daily newspaper, that has made history by becoming the first publication to release a fully AI-generated edition!
This Week in Products I want to dive into the Il Foglio, an Italian daily newspaper, that has just made history by becoming the first publication to release a fully AI-generated edition!
The newspaper’s editor, Claudio Cerasa, stated that the edition was fully created by AI—from writing the articles to crafting the headlines.
“For everything. For the writing, the headlines, the quotes, the summaries. And, sometimes, even for the irony,” he said.
As the founder of ProdWrks, a product-thinking community + publication that thrives on the storytelling of how products, businesses, and industries are built, I found this move fascinating, but not surprising.
Journalism, like every other industry, is on the precipice of massive change due to AI. In today’s newsletter, we explore what journalism means in the AI era.
This discussion is deeply relevant to us at ProdWrks as we recently launched Pulse Magazine
Pulse is crafted via real conversations with product founders, offering genuine insights and thought-provoking stories about products, technology, and the people shaping them.
Check it out!
Now, back to the story👇
The Inevitable March of AI in Journalism
The immediate reaction to AI-generated news is often alarmist. “Will AI replace journalists?” But that’s the wrong question.
The better question is: What does AI enable that wasn’t possible before? Speed, automation, and volume are obvious. But what about nuance, storytelling, and human insight? Here’s how leading newsrooms use AI:
Reuters uses AI for reporting, writing, editing, production and publishing. Reuter’s also uses News Tracer to track down breaking news, so that journalists are not tied down to grunt work.
In 2015, The New York Times implemented its experimental AI project known as Editor to simplify the journalistic process of highlighting phrases, headlines, or main points of the text.
BBC News Labs' Juicer tool aggregates news from 850 sources, extracting and tagging stories into categories like people, organizations, and locations. This makes vast datasets more accessible, helping BBC’s journalists quickly find relevant content.
The Washington Post has been experimenting with automated news writing (sometimes referred to as “robot journalism”) using Heliograf smart software. The bot made its debut in the Summer of 2016 with coverage of the Rio Olympic Games. Heliograf put together the news story by analyzing data about the games as they emerged.
And now, Il Foglio has pushed the boundary even further: not just assisting, but replacing human writers entirely for an entire edition.
My question is… if AI can churn out readable, factually sound articles, does it fundamentally change what journalism is supposed to be?
The Two Faces of AI Journalism
We’ve seen that on one side, AI journalism offers incredible efficiency. It can generate articles in seconds, analyze massive datasets, and produce real-time news at a scale no human newsroom could match.
In theory, I believe AI could democratize journalism, allowing small publications to compete with giants or enabling niche stories to get covered when human reporters are spread thin.
Just like how Perplexity is challenging Google’s dominance in search today.
But here’s the other side…
AI lacks lived experience. It doesn’t investigate corruption, knock on doors, or chase leads in the rain.
Speaking from the perspective of tech journalism and running ProdWrks, AI doesn’t push the boundaries of inquiry. At ProdWrks, we know that great tech journalism isn’t just about reporting facts—it’s about uncovering what’s unsaid.
AI won’t sit across from a hesitant founder, help them collect their thoughts, and distill hard-earned lessons into actionable insights for others to learn from. That’s what human journalists here strive to do.
AI-generated journalism risks becoming sterile… informative, yet devoid of nuance, context, and the gut instinct that drives great storytelling.
Then, there’s bias.
AI doesn’t create insights from scratch; it remixes what already exists. If the data it’s trained on is flawed, so are its conclusions. In a world where trust in analysis is fragile, how do we ensure AI-driven narratives don’t just recycle existing distortions, reinforcing industry echo chambers instead of breaking them?
If AI writes all the news, who ensures the integrity of the output? Who audits AI bias? Who decides what gets covered and what doesn’t?
Finally, if newsrooms start prioritizing AI for cost efficiency, will we lose local journalism? Will investigative journalism suffer? These are not just theoretical concerns; they define the future of information itself.
The Future of Journalism…What Product Leaders Building News-Tech Should Be Wary of
For product leaders in media, tech, and AI-driven products, there are key takeaways here. AI’s entry into journalism is no different from its impact in healthcare—where technology supports doctors, not replaces them.
Journalism too must remain human-first, tech-assisted.
Second, transparency matters.
If AI is writing, consumers deserve to know. Just as we label AI-generated art, AI-generated news must be disclosed. Trust is the foundation of journalism, and obscuring AI’s role could erode it.
Finally, this is a moment of opportunity.
Publications that embrace AI while preserving journalistic integrity will thrive. Those who see AI as just a way to cut costs risk losing their audience.
The Final Question(s)
So, what do we make of Il Foglio’s experiment?
If AI is the future of news, we must ask: what kind of news do we want to consume? Perhaps the real question isn’t whether AI can replace journalists, but whether we want it to.
The answer to that question will shape the future of media more than any algorithm ever could.
What This Means for Us at ProdWrks
At ProdWrks, we’ve always been about capturing the ‘behind-the-scenes’—the real decisions, struggles, and insights that shape how great products and companies are built. This is something AI can’t replicate, but it can certainly assist with.
We already use AI to make our work more efficient:
Researching companies and founders before interviews, ensuring we ask the most relevant and insightful questions.
Transcribing and summarizing interviews so we can focus on analysis rather than note-taking.
Identifying trends across industries by processing large volumes of information quickly.
But here’s the difference: AI helps us find the dots, but it’s our journalists who connect them. It can’t conduct an off-the-record conversation with a founder who just pivoted their business. It can reword existing knowledge, but it can’t ask the kind of hard, unexpected questions that lead to breakthrough insights.
This philosophy is what led us to launch Pulse Magazine by ProdWrks—our newest initiative dedicated to in-depth, thought-provoking stories about products, technology, and the people behind them.
Unlike AI-generated news, Pulse is built on real conversations, real insights, and real narratives. We don’t just report what happened; we explore the why and how. We sit down with founders, product leaders, and industry veterans to uncover their unfiltered perspectives—the kind that no algorithm can predict or generate.
For us, Pulse is a response to the AI era. While AI can generate content at scale, we believe true storytelling is about depth, context, and human curiosity. That’s what Pulse is designed to deliver.
So, if you care about how great products and businesses are built, not just the headlines, but the real stories behind them… Pulse is for you.
Check it out and let us know what you think.
A video I enjoyed watching this week
Automating Coding, Breaking Tech Barriers
I think the biggest advancement in tech this year is how coding is getting democratized. We already spoke about “vibe coding” and tools like Lovable AI which are turning simple texts into full-blown products.
In this video we hear OpenAI's CPO Kevin Weil predict that coding will be fully automated THIS YEAR! He explains how OpenAI's models are already ranking among the world's top programmers and shares his thoughts on Deep Research, GPT-4.5's human-like qualities, the future of jobs, and the timeline for GPT-5.
Watch the video for detailed insights
Healthcare +AI
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Speaker:
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📬I hope you enjoyed this week's curated stories and resources. Check your inbox again next week, or read previous editions of this newsletter for more insights. To get instant updates, connect with me on LinkedIn.
Cheers!
Khuze Siam
Founder: Siam Computing & ProdWrks