About the company: Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger Medien
The Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger Medien is one of the brands belonging to the German media group KStA, best known for publishing the largest newspaper in the Cologne–Bonn Metropolitan Region.
Cooperation with People More
People More supports KStA in the daily maintenance and enhancements of their main media brands. Our experts work across frontend and backend development, optimize cloud usage, and build advanced data engineering solutions – including a recommendation engine and database architecture. Additionally, they have developed mobile applications for both Android and iOS platforms.
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Meet Robert Zilz, Head of Data at Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger Medien.
How do you envision newsrooms of the future in the next few years, and in what ways could AI revolutionize the publishing industry?
AI is already becoming a central part of the editorial workflow, just like a commonly used tooling deeply nested within the processes and mindset of editorial teams. These teams are spending a lot of time on topics beside their core-identity: content. AI will help streamline processes, speed up execution, and automate many time-consuming tasks.
To give you an example: editorial members shouldn’t spend their time on site management. AI is far more capable of doing this in no time and with all data needed to deliver the best product possible to the users.
What AI-powered tools are currently being used in newsrooms to automate content creation and distribution processes?
There are certainly many vendors offering AI-powered editorial tools, but I do see a lot of in-house research and development of specific AI solution. The focus is increasingly on integrating LLMs into existing workflows and tools, such as CMS.
The usage of RAG to ensure the integration of domain-specific knowledge is also something we do see a lot and is powerlifting available LLMs to the own needs. The next step may involve adopting smaller, task-specific models to improve cost and compute efficiency, instead of relying solely on one-size-fits-all solutions.
In your experience, how would you respond to concerns that AI might replace journalists? Does AI truly threaten jobs, or could it create new career paths for media professionals?
I think the the fear of job loss in publishing industry is entirely rational. While some roles may indeed be at risk due to AI, but on the other hand there are so much new potential career paths and further development arising.
In what ways is artificial intelligence transforming how readers consume content? Have you observed changes in audience habits and expectations?
I strongly believe that users are already accustomed to specific AI-based product components and features. And speaking of GenAI in particular we’re seeing an even deeper integration of AI. For example, Apple Intelligence or Googles AI overviews. When looking at more “established” AI-driven features like personalization, these are no longer seen as cutting-edge innovations, but rather as basic expectations from users.
Are readers aware when content is co-created by AI, and if so, how does this awareness affect their trust in media or credibility of published content?
At KStA Medien we’ve included AI-disclaimer within every AI-assest that we’re publishing since day one to offer full transparency about that. We haven’t had bad feedback of the users regarding the usage of AI nor have we observed any decline in trust. And I strongly believe that the society is of course evolving and growing alongside GenAI as well because it is one of the major topics of our time. I can imagine that in the future media can position itself heavily on the trustworthiness due to a world that makes it very easy to create fake-content at scale.
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Mateusz Cieślak
