It all started two years ago, when VG’s management team gave the project two assignments. The first was to develop a new and radically different version of VG aimed at the younger digital generation – young adults aged 18 to 30. The second was to find out just how extensively AI could be used in such a product.
“We’ve taken the latter all the way. VGX is a 100 percent AI-based product,” says Rolf Sønstelie, the editor responsible for VGX.
This means that no new content is produced specifically for VGX – all content comes from Schibsted’s media houses, primarily VG. And the product itself is built entirely using agents and prompts.
“Our vision is to create something that has the positive qualities people associate with editorial media and that can become an alternative to social media. If we can solve many of the challenges young people experience with today’s media, I think that will benefit other audiences as well.”
Rolf has a long history at VG, including roles as editor of VGTV, editorial manager and acting news editor. He is now leading something he is willing to call unique.
“At least I’m not aware of any other traditional media companies investing this radically in exploring the future of media.”
Looking for an innovation
He believes the online newspaper has reached its peak, and that they are now exploring whether an innovation can be created to take its place.
“It’s a disruptive mission, and an extremely difficult one in a transformation shaped by social media and AI. So we genuinely don’t know whether we will succeed. That makes it all the more courageous of VG and Schibsted to do this.”
In January this year, the beta version of the app was launched and opened to everyone. It followed a year and a half of extensive audience research and testing of numerous prototypes.
The needs they identified were:
- Help me get a quick and simple overview of the news
- Help me understand why it matters
- Help me stay up to date on what is relevant to me
- Help me switch off from stress and demands
VGX is therefore designed to offer engaging, easy-to-understand news that can be consumed quickly and efficiently. The result is a feed where users can choose how much or how little they want to explore a topic while quickly getting an overview. The experience has been compared to TikTok. But news remains at its core – this is a VG product, built for new generations.
Knaggers is what serves it all up. That is the name of the AI setup behind VGX. Knaggers reads and views everything produced across Schibsted’s media houses and clusters the content into topics. These are then sent to what Rolf calls an AI desk, where different prompts and agents transform and enrich the content for VGX.
Different agents are responsible for different parts of a story. One, for example, writes an engaging headline, while another updates the story with the latest developments. Another determines whether the content is breaking news, and another selects suitable images. The result is stories produced in a set of predefined formats.
Gather a topic in one story
The idea is that users should not have to read multiple articles about the same topic. Instead, the latest and most relevant information is brought together in a single story.
“An enormous amount of data passes through the system. The process deals with large and complex topics that have to be turned into small formats, completely automatically. And this happens around the clock,” Rolf explains.
If something goes wrong, the people working on the project cannot simply edit the text or product directly.
“We have to go into the prompt or the data.”
To make changes easier, they have built agents into the product that can be used when, for example, they want a different headline or need to rearrange the feed.
And yes, things have gone wrong from time to time. When tech companies release new language models, the prompts need to be adjusted. Knaggers also struggles at times to achieve the right mix in the feed and to include more niche content, such as stories from E24. And when content from Aftonbladet is used, Swedish text can sometimes appear in the feed.
With the renewed mandate, Schibsted is increasing its investment in the project, and the team is being expanded with two new employees who will work with content. An additional UX designer and a new business developer have also been hired.
Although the intention has always been for the whole of Schibsted to benefit from the learnings, VG has until now provided most of the resources. Schibsted is now becoming a bigger “co-owner”, and parts of the team will become part of Schibsted’s product organisation.
“VGX is now becoming part of Schibsted’s new AI strategy. We are the first experiment in developing a product built with AI from the ground up, from start to finish.”
But what do the people working with content actually do if everything is automated? Josefine Ytre-Eide Bjaarstad, who until now has been responsible for content, has developed and tested concepts and formats and created fully automated AI workflows, Rolf explains.
Next step for Videofy
Josefine has also played an important role in developing Videofy 10x – Schibsted’s own video tool, which creates videos from text and images and is now being rolled out at Aftonbladet and VG.
The two new employees working with content are a journalist and a producer with video expertise. They will experiment with new ways of storytelling and new formats that the AI can be trained on.
They will also continue developing Videofy.
“Today, Videofy delivers videos that are around 70 percent finished. We’re going to experiment with getting to 100 percent, and with AI-generated voices when they become better in Norwegian. Videofy is the tool that can help us create liquid content. We’re going to push the boundaries and see how users respond,” says Rolf.
More radical changes are planned for 2027. The plan is to integrate user-generated content in the form of local news or specific topic areas, and to test collaborations with external content creators who have credibility in areas young people care about. The team also wants to explore solutions for opinion content where users can help shape the perspective.
“We are still the ones telling the story to users, but at VG we need to meet them at eye level. We want to let the readers in,” says Rolf.
They will also experiment with personalisation. The ambition is to adapt content according to what readers are interested in, or according to how much or how little they already know about a topic.
Today, the beta app has almost 25,000 logged-in users who can provide feedback directly in the app.
“We get loads of comments every day,” says Rolf, who is generally pleased with the feedback.
Positive comments often relate directly to what the team set out to achieve: making it easier to understand the bigger picture. Critical users point out bugs and features that are not yet working fully – and ask for new functionality.
So what does Rolf himself think – is VGX the news product of the future?
“We’re running a live experiment that points to one possible way forward.”
