Nikita Roy is a 2026 RJI Professional Innovation Fellow. She is building Newsroom Radar, an AI-powered audience intelligence system that proactively surfaces editorial insights, audience risks, and coverage opportunities. Local newsrooms already have audience data from newsletter signups, survey responses, article comments, donation records and website analytics. Newsroom Radar connects these and unifies them using an open-source data standardization pipeline and then runs continuous AI analysis to detect patterns, anomalies, and opportunities. Newsroom Radar doesn’t wait to be asked. It watches. It thinks. It tells you what matters. 

Nikita Roy is a data scientist, journalist, and Harvard-recognized AI futurist. She is the founder of Newsroom Robots Lab, an AI training, strategy, and product development company for media organizations, currently incubating at Harvard Innovation Labs. She also hosts the Newsroom Robots Podcast, which has ranked among the top technology podcasts in more than 30 countries on Apple Podcasts. She was named one of twelve pioneers and power players shaping the future of news in the 2025 Future Today Strategy Group Tech Trends Report.