#19 The News Homepage Formula: A/B Testing, Ice Ice Baby stunt, and Losing Control to Personalization. Helge Voll Hustad at VG (Schibsted)

In this episode of Insight Shapes News by Kilkaya, host Nils Ove Håland Riise sits down with Helge Voll Hustad, Homepage Editor at VG — Norway's largest news site, where he curates the homepage with news for millions of Norwegians.

They start with VG's now-famous "Ice Ice Baby" homepage, run in the middle of one of the darkest news months of the year, and what it says about the room editors have to experiment, even on a heavy news day.

From there, Helge walks through the real mechanics of editing a tabloid homepag at scale: why "the mix" of hard news and light news is a constant balancing act, why a billionaire's name in a headline often underperforms simply writing "the billionaire," and why familiar faces like Prime Minister Støre don't need a caption at all — something AI headline tools still can't reliably figure out.

The conversation also digs into personalization and control. Helge used to be able to place every single story on VG's front page by hand. Now an algorithm controls everything below the top 20 — and he's candid about what that trade-off costs an editor, what VG would need to see before moving that line further, and how the team weighs personalization against its societal responsibility to surface hard news.

They close on the three KPIs VG actually optimizes for, the "superuser trap" of editing for readers who visit eight times a day versus once, and why VG's extreme high direct-traffic share makes the homepage worth protecting.

🎧 Topics we cover:

• The "Ice Ice Baby" homepage and how far editorial humor can go
• What a homepage editor actually does, curating 70–80 live articles
• "The mix" — balancing hard news, sport, celebrity and politics
• Why an NYT study of tens of thousands of A/B tests found no universal rule
• Billionaire vs. named billionaire, and when a picture replaces a caption
• Where AI headline generation breaks down — and why
• Losing control: from editing every story to only the top 20
• The bonfire principle vs. personalization, and the societal obligation problem
• Clicks, quick exit, and demographics — VG's three core KPIs
• The "superuser" trap: editing for readers who visit 8x a day vs. once
• Why so much of VG's traffic comes directly to the Homepage
• A closing question passed from Tarmo Paju (Delfi) on journalism's role in covering war

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