NEW YORK — While the global media industry remains fixated on whether generative AI can—or should—write the news, Kathryn Kotze is turning the lens toward the systems that fund, manage, and sustain it. As Head of Operations and Impact at South Africa’s Daily Maverick, Kotze took the stage at Media Party New York 2026 to shift the conversation from content generation to institutional resilience.
In her keynote, titled “Journalism First. What If AI Handled the Rest?”, Kotze delivered a pragmatic manifesto for the modern newsroom. Her argument was precise: to safeguard the mission of investigative journalism, publishers must leverage automation to eliminate the administrative friction that currently threatens to drown small and medium-sized organizations.
The Sustainability Paradox
Kotze opened her talk with a nod to World Press Freedom Day, framing the struggle for editorial independence not just as a fight against censorship, but as a battle against “declining revenue streams and failing market contexts.”
At Daily Maverick, a publisher defined by its investigative and accountability reporting, resource allocation is a constant tightrope act. 70% of the 120-person team is dedicated strictly to the newsroom. The remaining 30% is responsible for the full scope of business operations, including product development, tech, sales, HR, finance, and events.
The journalism doesn’t sustain itself,” Kotze warned. “If we invest as much as possible into the newsroom while ignoring the supporting functions, we do it to our own demise.”
The Evolution of Operational AI: From Friction to Functionality
Kotze, a non-technical leader with a background in financial investments, admitted that her relationship with Large Language Models (LLMs) was “deeply frustrating” until very recently. However, 2026 has marked a turning point. The emergence of multi-dimensional, no-code tools has allowed operations teams to build “mini-assistants” that handle complex, nuanced tasks without requiring a single line of code.
She highlighted three key areas where AI is currently transforming Daily Maverick’s operational efficiency:
- Revenue Generation: Kotze detailed how a complex grant proposal process that typically required four days of intensive labor was reduced to a single afternoon. By training an LLM on six years of historical project data, she secured $100,000 in funding with just an hour of refinement.
- Project Management: For a recent Journalism AI grant, the organization bypassed the need for an external consultant—which typically consumes 10% of a grant budget—by training a custom “Project Manager” within Claude. This AI agent manages six different teams, plans meetings, and holds staff accountable to deliverables.
- Editorial Triage: Facing hundreds of opinion submissions daily, the team now uses an automated workflow to summarize articles, research authors, and check for sentiment alignment, allowing editors to focus only on the top 1% of content.
Empowering the Newsroom
A central focus of Kotze’s presentation addressed the integration of AI into Impact Tracking. For independent media, proving the real-world effect of a story is vital for reader donations and grant eligibility. Yet, the “intentional journalism” required to track this impact involves a heavy administrative lift that most reporters avoid.
By using AI to analyze story drafts and automatically generate stakeholder lists, distribution plans, and “theory of change” frameworks, Daily Maverick is making impact tracking a byproduct of the work rather than a chore. The AI acts as a co-pilot, suggesting engagement strategies that the journalist can then refine or adopt.
Institutional Resilience in the AI Era
The takeaway from Kotze’s keynote was a shift in perspective. Instead of viewing AI as a replacement for human creativity, she views it as a way to reclaim human capacity.
By delegating the “business of journalism” to specialized LLMs—the revenue managers, the strategists, the project leads—newsrooms can stop over-investing in administrative headcount and start reinvesting in the reporters who tell the stories that matter.
The goal isn’t just to be more efficient; it’s to ensure that in a world of shrinking margins, the journalism always comes first.
It’s not about doing everything at once,” Kotze concluded. “It’s about choosing easy wins… until that capacity has improved.”
Stay tuned for more updates and deep dives from Media Party New York 2026!
