Kat Downs Mulder: Inside Yahoo’s AI Strategy for the Future of News

For years, the aggregator model was simple: curate the best journalism from thousands of publishers and send audiences their way. Now that contract is being rewritten, and Yahoo News is one of the most interesting places to watch it happen.In this episode of Newsroom Robots, host Nikita Roy speaks with Kat Downs Mulder, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Yahoo News, about how the platform is layering AI across every surface of a product that reaches an estimated 180 million people in the U.S. alone each month. Kat previously spent more than 14 years at The Washington Post as chief product officer and managing editor before taking on the challenge of modernizing one of the internet's original news destinations.The conversation explores Yahoo's acquisition of Artifact, the AI news app built by Instagram's co-founders, which gave the platform a new recommendation engine that prioritizes time spent reading over clicks. It also digs into Yahoo Scout, the company's new AI answer engine that synthesizes information with rich citations and visual context, and an AI-powered daily audio digest designed to turn personalized news into a listening habit. Each of these products makes Yahoo more useful to its audience, but each also changes the relationship between Yahoo and the publishers whose journalism powers the platform.When an answer engine can deliver what a user needs without a click-through, when an audio digest summarizes a story so well the article never gets opened, and when personalization makes the aggregator the destination instead of the pass-through, the old economics stop working for publishers. Kat is candid that the compensation models haven't been figured out yet, noting that Yahoo is working with the Microsoft Publisher Content Marketplace to develop new frameworks, but that the industry is still writing those rules in real time.She makes a strong case for how Yahoo is approaching this differently, from how Scout prominently surfaces publishers to the rev-share model they operate, and why she believes the quality flywheel they are building actually rewards better journalism. Kat argues that original, distinctive journalism will become more valuable in an AI world because AI agents will seek out what is unique. This episode covers: 03:20 — Why Yahoo acquired Artifact and how it shifted recommendation algorithms 06:20 — The shift from click-based metrics to deeper engagement signals such as session time and retention 08:50 — Inside Yahoo Scout, Yahoo's new AI answer engine built to support publishers and the open web 12:40 — The changing economics of news as AI platforms begin generating answers instead of sending traffic 17:40 — Yahoo's personalized AI-generated audio news digest and why multimodal news experiences matter 22:00 — How Yahoo's editorial and AI teams collaborate on quality control at scale 31:00 — How AI is transforming newsroom product development and prototyping 36:10 — The tension between personalization and journalism's civic responsibility 40:00 — What smaller newsrooms can learn from their AI product playbookSign up for the Newsroom Robots newsletter for episode summaries and insights from host Nikita Roy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.