Automating Investigative Journalism
What I've been building.
I am automating investigative journalism at Effort.News
We’re breaking five stories today based on verifiable financial data which everyone missed for years.
Obviously there’s a ton of slop writing, and we aren’t doing that. What AI does well is surface patterns in million+ item databases, filings, disclosures, and financial records. These records withstood the tightest of human review. It equalizes the playing field for stories which would otherwise be buried in noise.
The stories are written by me and human beings I work with.
First we have Preferred Communities:
We queried thousands of federal grants and identified rapid spikes in Refugee resettlement grants under the Biden administration. We traced that funding some of the most famous anti-Trump, pro-asylum groups which claimed to represent Christian Americans.
Next, we found continued race-based discrimination by California programs using federal Medicaid dollars.
We did this using a one-line query after our initial setup – “Identify all funding records for programs which discriminate by race” – and it’s the tip of the iceberg of what we found.
But could we detect foreign influence campaigns? The answer is yes. We found a British campaign to import digital ID laws to America. We worked backwards through decentralized federal and state filings to create a unified record of foreign interference.
The infamous “economists have done the maths” letter are overwhelming heirs to 19th and 20th century family fortunes. This speaks for itself.
These heirs were obfuscated using Swiss Bank accounts which made it difficult to trace funding back to their respective donors. But we were partially able to de-obfuscate Swiss Philanthropy Foundations pooled records based on other information.
Last but not least – a story that began from “a provable truth that everyone disagrees with”.
We found, mostly through secondary sources, that the EV “dumping” claims made by both presidents and ad nauseum by the auto lobby — are completely false.
Please share the stories and the most important data points along the way. It’ll help us make the biggest impact on our first day online.
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Substack note*:
Unfortunately, the new site will not be on Substack! The main deal breaker was the (lack of) interactive graph support. Everything else about Substack is great, and I miss some of the content management system already.