As the largest independent media outlet in Slovakia, Dennik N is driven by reader loyalty.
A healthy subscription level of more than 70,000 paying subscribers helps the publisher to remain independent of political or commercial influence.
At the beginning of 2025 it added more than 10,000 subscribers in just four days on the back of an impressive marketing campaign that combined reader value with a manifesto of social commitments.
The success of the campaign, reported on and emulated by publishers throughout Europe, showed how this relationship with readers is the key to Dennik N’s success.
And as the publisher took its first steps with incorporating generative AI and LLMs into the editorial workflow, it was vital this fundamental sense of trust was not damaged by the risks that come with these new technologies.
The mentorship and project
Dennik N decided to use the DDRR project to develop an AI assistant to supercharge the manual functions in their CMS.
Alongside this, their plan was to publish a large selection of long and short form pieces and social media posts to challenge the spread of disinformation in their Slovakian and Hungarian markets, giving readers the media literacy skills to navigate the new information landscape,
The mentorship, with Dennik N’s Director of Innovation, Veronika Munk, focussed on project managing these two strands over a period of 12 months.
Along the way, as well as keeping track of progress and development, we discussed the ethical dimensions of incorporating AI into editorial outputs, how this might change the internal dynamics of the organisation and how other publishers and broadcasters across Europe were incorporating ethical AI policies into their daily management.
Progress and implementation
The development of the AI Assistant, as it became known to the newsroom, was swift, with in-house developers at Dennik N experimenting with various LLMs plugged into the CMS.
The assistant evolved into a tool which would generate tags to turbocharge SEO discovery, create grammatical and contextual suggestions for the authors, summaries and other repetitive tasks.
Translation between Slovakian and Hungarian was a also a key focus, enabling the repurposing of large amounts of content across territories.
As the tools was tested in live environment, editorial staff with an appetite for technology were key to helping their colleagues adopt the new, time-saving, workflows.
Simple to use, the tool was explained to the teams in a series of ‘micro-training’ sessions.
At the same time, an editorial focus on the content around disinformation produced a wide range of simple explainers, in-depth long reads on the impact of AI technologies on news and media, as well as social posts to give context and background.
Posts and content were written for different age groups in both publishing territories, giving readers vital unbiased independent context in a period of elections and political change.
Impact and key achievements
As well as generating a significant number of metatags and creating time-saving processes for Dennik N authors, the AI Assistant helped grow the online audience.
In a year when most news publishers saw a huge impact from the ‘AI cliff’ of disappearing search referrals, Dennik N actually saw a monthly page view growth year-on-year of 10 per cent, as well as a 15 per cent uplift in social referrals.
And they published more than 70 in-depth educational articles about facts, innovations of generative AI in the Slovak and Hungarian languages, generating nearly five million views.
Throughout the project, the mentoring process stressed the importance of human-in-the-loop checking procedures and the ethical responsibilities which come with LLM outputs.
The working practice around AI implementation in editorial is moving very quickly and Dennik N have not rushed to implement an ethical AI usage policy which might be out of date very quickly – but Veronika is working on a protocol framework which will shape the business’s response.
This mentorship process was conducted as part of the Business Innovation Synergizer programme within the Deepening Digital: Reinforcing Resilience project.