Kati Erwert & Tristan Loper: How The Seattle Times uses AI to drive revenue in local news
Newsroom RobotsShow Notes
At The Seattle Times, an AI tool identified a new prospect and helped close additional ad revenue in a single day. The Seattle Times is one of 11 news organizations participating in the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program, funded by OpenAI and Microsoft. Through this initiative, AI engineering fellow Rajesh Barade worked with the advertising team to address their challenges and developed a prospecting agent. This tool enables sales representatives to enter a category or focus area, identify businesses spending in that market, find decision-makers, access advertising spend data, and generate personalized outreach.
The Seattle Times deliberately began its AI efforts in advertising rather than the newsroom. Early successes helped build momentum across the organization. This led to listening tours across finance, HR, and eventually the newsroom, where a municipal meeting listening tool is now in development.
This week on Newsroom Robots, host Nikita Roy speaks with Kati Erwert, Senior VP of Product Marketing and Public Service at The Seattle Times, and Tristan Loper, Head of National Programs at the Lenfest Institute, to explore how the prospecting agent works, why starting in advertising was key to unlocking organization-wide adoption, and what it takes to turn early AI successes into lasting capability.
In this episode:
02:07 — How The Seattle Times built internal momentum for AI adoption 05:51 — What the Lenfest AI Collaborative is and how it works 09:29 — Inside the prospecting agent: how a sales rep closed business in one day 14:11 — Why starting with advertising drove cultural change across the organization 17:07 — The buy vs. build decision in a fast-moving AI landscape 19:03 — How open-source code sharing works across the 11-newsroom cohort 24:44 — Building the municipal meeting listening tool and beyond 37:07 — Navigating the tension of blocking AI bots 45:47 — How smaller newsrooms can get started with AI today
This episode of Newsroom Robots is supported by The Lenfest Institute for Journalism.
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Chicago Public Media operates two distinct news brands: WBEZ, the public radio station, and the Chicago Sun-Times, the legacy newspaper. With audio and print journalism, both membership and advertising revenue, and decades of archives in multiple formats, they're a unique case study for AI in local news.