April 13, 2026 by Stefan ten Teije
Finnish media outlet Turun Sanomat has been piloting Decisions, the AI-powered newsroom assistant recently launched by smartocto. The people at the centre of it are keen to see it continue.
Katariina Norontaus, online producer
Johanna Käkönen, digital producer
Turun Sanomat is the leading regional newspaper in Southwest Finland. The website attracts 2 million visitors and around 6 million pageviews per month.
This isn’t the first time we’ve worked with Turun Sanomat. Read about their work with User Needs Labs in this client case, or download the User Needs Playbook, where we also recorded their experiences - and tips.
The data team and editorial staff at Turun Sanomat are seasoned smartocto users, but find number-heavy analytics overwhelming. The sheer volume of data (charts, reports, dashboards) makes it hard to see what actually needs attention, says Johanna Käkönen.
"We have a solid grasp of the user needs model, but we want to go further and say something meaningful about article quality. That's difficult when you're stuck staring at graphs and reports."
"What we love most about smartocto is the actionability," says Johanna Käkönen. "The notifications are the most interesting part of the analytics system. They keep us sharp, always pointing us toward what matters, even before we've decided how to act on it."
One example: Turun Sanomat published an article about industrial waste mishandling near the local drinking water reserve. The smartocto notification flagged that the article was getting solid readership but fewer than expected click-throughs. Katariina: "The topic itself was something that should definitely get lots of clicks: a potential public hazard caused by local criminal activity. The notification helped us realize maybe there was something wrong with the presentation, and we quickly ran an A/B test on the headline."
That same instinct now shapes how Turun Sanomat thinks at a strategic level, too. "Decisions helps us think bigger about strategy," says Johanna Käkönen. "We broadly understand what it takes to improve our journalism - which topics resonate with our audience, which user needs are most popular. What's been valuable is getting week-after-week input that aligns with and reinforces our own thinking. It stops that understanding from getting lost in the day-to-day."
Smartocto Decisions acts as an intelligent newsroom assistant that reads and interprets data, detects patterns, and translates them into clear and useful recommendations.
At crucial moments during your working day, the assistant can summarise what has changed, highlight what matters most, and suggest the next steps. It can also join the editorial conversation: interpreting results, identifying growth opportunities and helping shape strategic decisions.
Three smartocto clients have been given free access to Decisions for three months, with the agreement that they provide regular feedback and share how they'd ideally like to use the various features in practice.
We're now halfway through.
The aim is to find the right place for Decisions within the smartocto platform - perhaps even more than one. By having editorial teams help shape the feature along the way, we can be sure we're building something customers will actually want to use.
This is the kind of tool every newsroom is looking for: make better decisions and focus on your strategy”
Johanna Käkönen digital producer @ Turun Sanomat
Each week, the editorial team receives a summary report from Decisions. For now it arrives as a PDF by email, but it will likely become a dedicated tab within smartocto Insights, the environment where clients primarily access historical reporting.
Both Katariina Norontaus and Johanna Käkönen are optimistic, as they can see that the summaries align with the hypotheses they sometimes already had themselves. At other times, those hypotheses are actually challenged. In both scenarios, Decisions is invaluable: "We have invested a lot of time in smartocto Decisions and would love to test it further. This is exactly the kind of tool every newsroom has been looking for. It helps you shape your long-term strategy - and execute it week after week."
Some powerful examples in the eyes of Turun Sanomat:
Like many (if not most) newsrooms out there, the problem that Turun Sanomat faced wasn’t that they had insufficient data - but rather that they needed help finding clarity and a clear path from data to insight to action.
Decisions was created to help newsrooms cut straight through the noise of charts and dashboards by connecting analytics to action in terms that editors can understand. The fact that Katariina and Johanna are keen to keep using this feature speaks to its value.
Knowing more is great, but working smarter is better.
