News Machines

News Machines analyzes how news media in the U.S. and worldwide are innovating with AI. One new case study every week.

New posts

What six AI tools showed readers on election night, and what that means for news media

Nov 4, 2026

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8 min read

What six AI tools showed readers on election night, and what that means for news media

I tested Fox News' election chatbot against ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Mode for eight and a half hours. The chatbots had live results and some important limitations.

Ulrike Langer

How Der Spiegel brings the Nazi party membership files into ChatGPT and Claude

Oct 27, 2026

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11 min read

How Der Spiegel brings the Nazi party membership files into ChatGPT and Claude

Exclusive data, its own guardrails, first insights: What publishers can learn from Der Spiegel’s MCP server.

Ulrike Langer

Why local newsrooms should make AI their dispatcher

Oct 21, 2026

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8 min read

Why local newsrooms should make AI their dispatcher

AI has saved local newsrooms many hours of tedious work, and most have spent those hours producing more commodity news. That is a race you can't win, and those hours should go elsewhere.

Ulrike Langer

How tactile.news wants to help newsrooms listen to 10,000 people at once

The Lüneburg-based creative technology studio for journalism has learned in six years that what kills dialogue with audiences is a lack of time. The technology works. Soon AI interviewers are going to ask the follow-up questions that newsrooms have no time for.

Ulrike Langer

Why news publishers need to focus on AI agents more than scrapers

Oct 8, 2026

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8 min read

Why news publishers need to focus on AI agents more than scrapers

AI assistants that spend their owners’ money have arrived. So have the first tools to track how AI uses news. Publishers who start tracking now will have something to sell – and proof when their content is stolen.

Ulrike Langer

How the data journalist Marco Maas used AI to build a second brain

Sep 30, 2026

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8 min read

How the data journalist Marco Maas used AI to build a second brain

Marco's agent Marvin now runs large parts of his working life and learns from every mistake. What makes it trustworthy is not the language model but the rules and checks built around it.

Ulrike Langer

Sep 23, 2026

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8 min read

How I built an agentic system that evaluates 200 newsletters a day

My setup is immensely useful. But the early automation still failed because of the human factor. Here’s how I fixed that and how you can build your own system step by step.

Ulrike Langer

How the same quiz format performed 45 times better in a different spot

Sep 16, 2026

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6 min read

How the same quiz format performed 45 times better in a different spot

News publishers and their audiences love quizzes. But configuration and placement matter more than you might think. Two case studies from the Swiss broadcaster SRF and the German website sport.de prove the point.

Ulrike Langer

What 3,326 documented AI cases reveal about how little AI has changed the news business

Sep 9, 2026

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7 min read

What 3,326 documented AI cases reveal about how little AI has changed the news business

Katya Gorchinskaya's free database J·Index maps newsroom AI adoption across 130 countries. Spoiler: Almost everyone is stuck on the lower rungs of the ladder

Ulrike Langer

How to price your journalism for AI when you're flying blind

Aug 18, 2026

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10 min read

How to price your journalism for AI when you're flying blind

News publishers can finally state terms that AI crawlers understand. But you can’t confirm yet who they are.

Ulrike Langer

How Writers' Bloc wants to get small publishers paid when AI steals their work

Aug 12, 2026

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6 min read

How Writers' Bloc wants to get small publishers paid when AI steals their work

A fingerprint for every article, a watchdog for the web and AI models, and an alliance for collective bargaining. I interviewed the founder — and I'm signing up.

Ulrike Langer

Which media companies are making money with AI in real life, and how are they doing it?

Aug 5, 2026

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6 min read

Which media companies are making money with AI in real life, and how are they doing it?

I found out by querying Sergei Yakupov's AI for Newsroom database for free — and so can you. Here are my analysis and some tipps for your own queries.

Ulrike Langer