What happens when two people who talk before every episode finally sit down in front of a microphone together?
In this episode of Insight Shapes News by Kilkaya, host Nils Ove Håland Riise is joined by Tarjei Gilbrant, CEO and co-founder of Kilkaya, fresh from the INMA World Media Congress in Berlin.
Both participated in separate study tours visiting major German publishers. This conversation is their debrief — not a polished summary, but a direct exchange on what actually made an impression, and what it means for the industry.
The episode covers several publishers across both tours. Die Zeit stood out for its multi-format strategy and how it uses investigative data journalism — including an AI-assisted project that made Nazi party membership records from the US National Archives searchable for the first time. Tagesspiegel surfaced something most publishers quietly recognize but rarely address: their homepages are built for people who visit ten times a day, not the majority who arrive once.
Media Pioneer operated from two boats on a Berlin river. That detail aside, what made it notable was a subscription model reaching 76,000 paying subscribers — and a community-first approach that includes a tier priced at 10,000 euros per year.
Der Spiegel ended its relationship with Outbrain and Teads. Tarjei explains why he sees this as worth celebrating, and why he considers that category of widget a structural problem for editorial trust — not just a vendor choice.
Running through all of it is a question the industry keeps circling back to: in a world where AI can generate content at scale and platforms continue to reduce referral traffic, what is the actual advantage of being a publisher?
🎧 Topics we cover:
- How Die Zeit used AI to make historical Nazi membership records searchable and what it produced editorially
- Why the homepage is still optimized for the wrong reader
- The build-or-buy question and why enthusiasm is a productivity multiplier
- Why trust is no longer just an advantage — it may be the only one
- What Media Pioneer gets right about community and subscription
- The campfire analogy and why shared editorial context still matters
- Why AI confabulates with confidence on low-data subjects — and what that means for breaking news
- Der Spiegel removing Outbrain and Teads, and the revenue outcome
- Why republishing the same content as everyone else has no future
- What multi-format strategy actually looks like when done well
If you work in newsroom leadership, editorial strategy, product, or publishing, this episode is a ground-level account of what some of Europe's most interesting publishers are doing — and what the industry still needs to figure out.
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