How to use an AI-assistant workflow to do background research for a news story

As a data journalist, you often find yourself working on a topic you know very little about: a highly technical issue or a field that requires specialized knowledge. Before reaching out to experts for interviews, building up some background knowledge through research can help you ask better-informed questions and make the conversation smoother and more productive.

You could query a search engine, plunge into library archives, or read academic papers, and then summarize the key information and organize everything you’ve collected. For more advanced research, coding might be needed for scraping or to speed up bulk work. 

But now with an automated AI workflow, no code is needed. That gives you a faster way to get an outcome and the workflow you create will be reproducible for the next project. One solution I’ve used is StackAI. It lets me build a workflow by connecting different tools together, and run it with a click once the sequence is set up. 

I recently investigated high-hazard dams in Massachusetts for a project in my Open-Source Investigation class later published by WBUR. As a newcomer to the state, I needed to quickly get up to speed on the issues people care about most and how they’ve been covered by local news.

I started with a list of dam names as a test and built a workflow that searched for past news coverage, government reports, and policy discussions related to each dam. The workflow then organized the results into a research summary, with themes such as dam safety, infrastructure funding, flooding risks, and previous incidents – it works well as an initial kick-off. (See the research summary by StackAI.)