Large document sets.
WHERE IT GENUINELY HELPS
Searching thousands of documents for relevance
Extracting entities: names, companies, amounts, dates
Identifying patterns and connections Summarising individual documents Translating foreign-language material
THE WORKFLOW
AI identifies candidates. The journalist reads them.
That is the correct division and it is genuinely transformative for large disclosures.
WHAT NOT TO DO
Report a finding the system produced without reading the underlying document Rely on a summary as the basis of a claim Assume the search found everything
THAT LAST POINT
A search that misses relevant documents produces a story missing the important part.
Test the search against documents you know are relevant.
FOR ENTITY EXTRACTION
Useful for mapping connections. Verify every name and figure against the source.
FOR SENSITIVE MATERIAL
Leaked documents, confidential sources and unpublished investigations.
Establish where the material goes before uploading anything.
WHAT TO RECORD
Your methodology, so the work can be defended.