The AI Playbook for Local and Regional Publishers
Use cases, workflows and a 90-day plan
Use cases, workflows and a 90-day plan for effective automation in the editorial department
Please note: The AI Playbook is currently only available in German.
This playbook addresses precisely this point. It compiles the most important insights from the AI Lab for Regional Publishers, which was conducted together with Benjamin Kolb (CTO & Co-founder of Purple), Stefan Prinz (Editorial Director at Lensing Media), and Stefan Waldschmidt (Speaker at the Association of German Local Newspapers). The focus is not on abstract future scenarios, but on concrete, realistic AI workflows for regional and local newsrooms.
Which workflows are truly worthwhile? How do you build team acceptance? And how can a good idea be transformed into a clearly actionable next step? This playbook provides clear answers to these questions and shows how newsrooms can implement them with a realistic 90-day plan.
In this whitepaper, you will learn:
- Which 3 AI Workflows are particularly worthwhile for regional and local newsrooms today
- How to identify if a use case has the potential for a robust AI workflow
- What productive AI use in newsrooms requires – from acceptance and rules to Human in the Loop
- How to develop from initial ideas a realistic 90-day plan for your newsroom
Presented by
A software developer with a publisher’s instinct. A combination that is rarely found to this extent. Before co-founding SPRYLAB with Stephan in 2007, he was Technical Manager at Axel Springer, where he saw first-hand how difficult it is for publishers to align their tools and content. This led to the conviction that underpins Purple’s architecture today: open, modular systems rather than siloed solutions. As CTO, he is responsible for engineering, architecture and product partnerships.
Stefan Prinz brings a perspective drawn from day-to-day editorial work. At Lensing Media, through the AI Workshop and several bootcamps, he has established structures that do not treat AI as a niche topic for a select few, but rather integrate it across the entire editorial team. The focus is on acceptance, clear rules and the question of how AI actually benefits day-to-day operations. A look at the figures also shows just how systematically Lensing is tackling the issue: since October 2025, 330 editorial staff members have taken part in 16 AI bootcamps.
Stefan Waldschmidt is an advisor at the German Association of Local Newspapers and Local Media (VDL), which represents around 70 small and mid-sized daily newspapers reaching some five million readers. He knows the day-to-day reality of local media houses first-hand and brings that perspective to the conversation about digital transformation and AI in newsrooms.