Aftonbladet

He's seen this challenge from both ends of media spectrum.

He spent 13 years at Aftonbladet, which is Sweden's largest news organization.

It's, it's dominant digital news brand there.

He was the deputy publisher and director of editorial AI and innovation.

He led a dedicated AI hub to developing newsroom AI tools, and he recently left Aftonbladet to become co-founder of Hit Media, a newsletter startup aimed at young women who have traditionally been underserved by mainstream news.

And I wanna get into talking to Martin about the central question that I talked about just now, which is how we use AI to make a better news product.

Martin, welcome.

But, you know, i- if there was a single answer that's kind of for everybody, I would say that you probably would have expected more change, right?

So instead of, you know, letting others do that, they created, you know, a digital marketplace themselves, and they were competing with the newspapers.

And I think also VG and Aftonbladet, back when we saw that the digital newspaper, online newspaper were coming, we, you know, created our own organization.

independent from the legacy business, saying, OK, this is a new way of consuming news.

You really need to compete on the legacy business.

Swedish newspapers run pictures of Californian bathing beauties along with local news.

The comic strip Popeye appears in the Aftonbladet under the name of Carl Alfred.

The week we were there, Popeye had an adventure which ended with his saying, meaning, well, shake my tail.

You find that the schoolboy of Sweden has roughly the same ambitions as the schoolboy of Missouri...

All the troubles with the English and the American every day.

In Sweden, as in America at that moment, Russia was regarded as a crucial and pivotal point in international relations.

I heard some anti-Russian talk, more than in Denmark and Norway, but there was also the attitude expressed by the Baroness Erin Krona, a young, blonde newspaper woman on the staff of the Aftonbladet.

She said...

But it's not how you should interpret it.

I think I was very clear a few weeks later in Aftonbladet.

It's

about

I was bereft.

I was in the lobby with me, Ben Robertson, James Stevenson, and Toby Eck from Aftonbladet.

What a crew.

That's

He was arrested two hundred kilometers from Fagersta.

And not that much is known yet at this stage of the investigation, but, uh, the Aftonbladet newspaper had unconfirmed sources that said that this teenager had been in touch with, uh, with the suspect in, uh, various chats and had apparently encouraged, uh, the suspect to carry out this act and had also talked about wanting to do, you know, the same thing.

Uh, but, um, but as, as far as we know, there were no sort of concrete plans like that.

And, uh, we will probably find out more in the coming days.

And as you correctly point out, everybody was talking about this ad, and they got to play the victim, as they're playing the victim now over these ads on the back of buses.

And this is where politics falls down, right? There was another incident where Richard, Rikard Jomshof that I mentioned earlier on there, he called the political editor of the Aftonbladet newspaper, which would be like the Evening Herald, biggest evening newspaper in the country, and he called him a Quisling.

Quisling was the name of the man who ran the V- the sort of Vichy government, the, the occupied government in Norway back during the Second World War, and I think he was hung as a traitor.

But he called the political editor of this newspaper a Quisling, you know, so of a collaborator with the enemies of the state.