“Essentially, there are two big questions: Who will people trust in the future? And will convenience matter more than trust?” This was the framing that Gard Steiro, Editor-in-Chief and CEO of VG – Verdens Gang, used to open his presentation at WAN-IFRA’s World News Media Congress in Marseille on Tuesday morning. Gaining and maintaining readers’ trust is an essential goal for publishers to have a future in an information landscape disintermediated by AI platforms. But convenience –a key part of user experience – is also
crucial. “Trust alone is not enough, in my opinion. We also have to develop products that meet new user expectations. It’s too risky to leave it entirely to big tech to assemble the media experience of the future,” Steiro said. But because experimentation within existing products and platforms can be cumbersome and risky, VG has taken a small-scale “speedboat” approach to experimentation, he said. “Everybody knows how difficult it is to change the direction of a massive tanker in high speed. That is why our
philosophy in Schibsted and VG is to launch a few speedboats,” he said. “They can move faster, they can be more agile, they can make sharp turns and experiment freely without risking the entire cargo – or audience trust in our journalism.” “And one of these speedboats is called VGX,” he said – a project for which company tasked a small team to “rethink everything” and “challenge the way we work across VG and Schibsted.” Rewriting the news format This ambitious goal has meant questioning
and abandoning some basic tenets of news publishing, including even the traditional news article format. “Who decided that something that was created for the 19th century’s newspapers should remain the mother of all formats?” Steiro asked. This is related to what Steiro called “one of the biggest weaknesses for many current online newspapers” – namely, that they do not offer “young users a quick understanding of the overview of the news.” The VGX app features some radical decisions to create that offering. The app has
no traditional front page, instead presenting users with a feed of content. And rather than being primarily text-based, video is a natural part of the app experience. The goal is to explain and contextualise news, giving users the option to go deeper and access more comprehensive content if they wish. But instead of detailing the app’s features, Steiro said the app itself was not the main goal. Rather, it’s “what’s happening under the hood” that really counts. The way VGX is technically constructed makes it
possible for one reporter, collaborating with a suite of agents, to manage the app’s content. “So people are still essential in the process. They just have to work differently,” Steiro said. “Because in VGX, there is no CMS. There are no journalists waiting for instructions from an editor.” Going back to the “speedboat” metaphor, Steiro emphasised that the success of VGX as a standalone product is actually a secondary consideration. “The point of building a product like this is not the launch of a new
app that takes the world by storm. The point is to apply this technology inside our existing products.” “I think the chances of building a new app and getting a big share market share… it is extremely difficult.” “The best we can get out of this is to learn a lot. And if we succeed in something in VGX, we can move it into Aftenposten and other brands of Schibsted,” he said. ‘We have to move all our reporters up the value chain.’ Some parts
of the app have already had an impact on the brand’s legacy products. “Today, the users of VG receive a personalised update directly on the front page,” Steiro said. The update is tailored based on the user’s last visit, so someone who visited the app eight hours earlier gets a different update than someone who opened the app several days ago. “The goal is simple: You should always leave VG with the most important updates,” Steiro said. VG has also built Videofy and Podify tools,
which journalists can use to convert written content to video and audio. They are also exploring an “agentic” workflow, where a journalist interacts with the product through a chatbot interface. “Even though we are still early in the process, we have already seen significant effects,” Steiro said. The biggest of those has been that “we have made it possible for far more employees to do a task that previously required special skills.” It all links to the publisher’s high-level goal: “The core of our strategy
is to spend as few human resources as possible on tasks a machine can do better,” Steiro said. “A lot of stuff we do in VG today will be automated … We have to move our resources from production to making the stories that really matter,” he said. “We have to move all our reporters up the value chain.” Steiro concluded by sharing a dashboard view he looks at “every morning,” which features a very different set of statistics than the standard pageviews or engagement
metrics. “I used to look at reach, I used to look at everything else. Now we have developed a definition for content that cannot be replaced by AI. We have set a target for how big a share of all our content should be impossible to copy,” he said. “And this is a key step forward … because this content is our future.”
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