What you missed at Kordiam Editorial Days 2025: 5 insights for tomorrow's newsrooms
For two days, Hamburg's Maritime Museum was transformed into a laboratory of ideas for everyone who wants to make their newsroom leaner, faster and even more focused on their readers. For Purple, I personally attended an event hosted by our partner Kordiam for the first time and have fresh ideas for you. Here are my five most important findings from lectures, workshops and discussions — compact for everyone who couldn't be there.
1 | Kordiam's announcement: AI as a pragmatic assistant
Kordiam has presented two exciting new products, showing that artificial intelligence can also be used sensibly and innovatively in the area of topic planning and research. Matthias Kretschmer's insights were particularly exciting, as he showed the challenges of a modern planning tool: finding the right balance between functional diversity and ease of use. You'll have to wait a bit longer for further details. I can only reveal this much: Kordiam As a precaution, has already had its own company entered in the commercial register with “Kordiam AI Systems”.
2 | Yle: 2,000 journalists in 14 days
Finnish public service powerhouse Yle dared a mammoth migration: Within two weeks, the team rolled out a standardized planning solution for a good 2,000 employees and replaced countless Excel islands with a central workflow. The result: a single story data set, the proverbial single source of truth. For any editorial team that is still plagued with versioned Word documents, this is proof that radical simplification is feasible.
3 | News Corp: Speed through an open tech stack
Luke Sikkema has also explained the “Modern Newsroom” using a tangible example: News Corp is migrating its titles worldwide — from The Times unto The Australian — to a modular, API-first CMS platform with block-based editing. The effect? Stories are online in just a few simple steps because editors visually click together content instead of adapting code or templates. For Sikkema, however, Tempo remains a means to an end: Only when teams juggle fewer tabs do they have the capacity to integrate AI tools in a meaningful way — for example for quick headline tests or automatic image descriptions. The message for us: Open, integrable systems create the foundation on which AI delivers real added value.
4 | TV schedules meet user needs
Digital planning should not only be based on morning analytics dashboards. Gregor Landwehr, associate manager at Highberg, showed how to use linear TV clocking as a data layer: Broadcast peaks are fed into Kordiam to place regional stories exactly when the audience's attention is looking for related topics. The result is a proactive rather than reactive planning cycle that increases retention without forcing editors into rigid grids. For local publishers, this is a blueprint of how small teams with strategic planning can assert themselves alongside the “big ones.”
5 | Five takeaways for joint Kordiam x Purple projects
- AI must be stuck in the workflow, not next to it.
- Migration works when data models are right.
- Open, integrable systems create speed.
- Planning ≠ calendar maintenance — external signals bring retention.
- Digital-first CMS systems such as Purple come full circle.
Conclusion
Whether it's a media company or a regional publisher: The days in Hamburg have shown that integration + AI + user-centered planning can form a highly exciting success triangle for your editorial planning in 2025. If you rely on modular systems today, you can test, scale and monetize faster tomorrow. Contact us anytime if, together with Kordiam and Purple, you want to streamline your editorial workflows, tap into AI potential and get content to your readers even faster.
