The partnership
Factiverse's partnership with Viestimedia came through WAN-IFRA's GAMI incubator programme, an accelerator designed to enable established media brands to work with highly innovative companies like Factiverse.
The goal was straightforward: to confront pressing issues within journalism and media together and deliver a measurable impact that could be replicated across more organisations.
The programme matched partners around specific industry challenges. Viestimedia brought one that cuts to the heart of modern journalism. Media organisations are struggling to maintain public trust when covering elections and political issues, with misinformation spreading and audiences unable to distinguish realistic policy proposals from campaign rhetoric.
Traditional fact-checking articles were reactive, didn't scale during intense campaign periods, and failed to engage younger audiences.
The challenge was to use technology to provide real-time analysis of political content and republish fact-checked content in formats attractive to younger audiences.
With Viestimedia being one of the largest Finnish news publications, specialising in forestry and machinery alongside updates on current affairs and politics, they were exactly the kind of partner the programme was built for.
The foundation was already there
Through initial collaborations and discussions, it became clear that Factiverse and Viestimedia's core technical capabilities could be merged through an API.
Viestimedia had already built its own AI product, Renki, to boost internal efficiency across numerous newsroom processes, including front page editing, fact-checking, image search, spelling, statistics, reports, and RSS feeds. The tool had been well received by journalists within Viestimedia, delivering efficiency gains of 20–30% across key areas of the newsroom.
The foundation was strong. What was needed was a next level.
Pre-deployment setup
The integration didn't happen overnight. Factiverse and Viestimedia's team spent time in the setup phase testing content across all five languages, making sure the accuracy and output matched what journalists actually needed.
The goal wasn't to hand over a fully finished product; it was to make sure Renki felt like it had always been able to do this.
The Solution in Action
Factiverse capabilities were brought in to take those gains further. By connecting the Factiverse Gather API to Viestimedia's Renki app, Renki gained the immediate ability to analyse textual, video, and audio content on YouTube across Finnish, English and Swedish.
Viestimedia journalists previously had no way to process large volumes of video content at scale. With Factiverse, they could now generate transcripts, extract key claims, and analyse those claims across hundreds of hours of footage in five languages.
In terms of analysing textual content, they connected their database of Finnish Parliamentary sessions and other custom databases to our API. Allowing them to analyse and verify information according to sources they trust and have found reliable in the past.
Their ability to rapidly analyse key claims or texts increased and provided an edge in terms of speed and coverage of breaking events.
What changed
The integration didn't replace what Viestimedia had built but rather extended to something greater than it was before.
Renki went from a strong internal efficiency tool to a multilingual multimedia research platform without rebuilding from scratch.
But the bigger shift was what it meant for the journalists themselves. Political content that once slipped through a YouTube livestream, a campaign speech in English, or a policy debate in Swedish could now be tracked, transcribed, and checked.
The volume of content that modern journalism demands you monitor is no longer a constraint you manage around. It's something you can actually meet.
That's the value of the Factiverse API: it slots into existing workflows and immediately expands what your team can cover.
"Political content doesn't wait for you to catch up. Before this integration, fact-checking and monitoring political video at scale simply wasn't possible. Now it is — and it works directly inside the Renki workflow our journalists already use every day."
Taru Salo, Head of Digital Development, Data & AI, Viestimedia
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