Alma Media's newsrooms now use more than 40 in-house AI tools
Alma News Media, the publisher behind Iltalehti and Kauppalehti, says it has built more than 40 AI tools for its journalists, from a reader-interest predictor to transcription and translation. Its foreign desk estimates the tools save up to two hours per shift.
Martti Asikainen | 8.10.2026 | Photo by Adobe Stock Photos
Alma Media, the Finnish publisher, says it has developed more than 40 AI tools to support journalists, covering work from newsgathering to publication. The company described the toolkit in a blog post by Timo Kämäräinen, AI Director of Alma News Media.
The tools were built by Alma News Media’s internal AI team in close collaboration with journalists. Alma News Media includes Iltalehti, which it describes as Finland’s largest digital news media, and Kauppalehti, which it calls the leading financial news media.
Built in the newsroom, for the newsroom
According to Kämäräinen, ideas often come directly from newsroom needs, such as repetitive tasks, workflow bottlenecks or ways to improve quality. He wrote that the aim is not technology for its own sake, but tools that solve real editorial problems.
The overall goal, he said, is to let AI handle more repetitive work so that journalists have more time for reporting, judgement and original ideas. Editorial responsibility, he stressed, always remains with the people in the newsroom.
The most popular tool is the hit predictor, which estimates how much readers are likely to be interested in a story. Journalists often use it several times while working on an article, to compare different angles and headlines. Journalists still make the final editorial decisions, Kämäräinen said.
The second most popular is Language Buddy, an AI assistant that checks spelling, clarity and style against the newsroom’s guidelines. It is built into the editorial system, so journalists can review its suggestions without copying text between services.
Less typing, more reporting
Audio Buddy turns interviews, press conferences and other recordings into text. Kämäräinen described manual transcription as one of journalism’s most time-consuming routine tasks, and said the tool lets journalists move sooner to key passages, fact-checking and reporting.
The foreign news team uses a translation tool daily to process source material and follow developments in other languages. Together, the translation and transcription tools currently deliver the biggest time savings for foreign news journalists. The foreign desk estimates that AI saves up to two hours per shift.
The latest addition is Newsradar, which scans emails for news and alerts reporters.
Kämäräinen said the toolkit rests on dedicated AI expertise, journalistic insight and a willingness to experiment. Rather than waiting for ready-made solutions, he wrote, Alma has invested in building its own capabilities and keeps testing new ideas with journalists.
The post does not say how the tools were built, which AI models they use, or how the time savings were measured.
