Welcome to Sourcebase News

Some of the most important stories in journalism are hiding in plain sight. The evidence is there — in court records, government documents, financial disclosures, internal emails and congressional testimony. But finding the right piece of information, connecting it to other evidence and recognizing its significance can take weeks or months of painstaking work.

Sometimes the story never gets told.

We are launching Sourcebase News because we believe artificial intelligence can help change that. Not by replacing reporters or the judgment they bring to their work, but by giving them the ability to investigate vast collections of information in ways that were previously impossible.

The question we have been working on is simple: What if journalists could spend less time searching for the facts and more time figuring out what they mean?

How It Works

Over several years, Ron Suskind, the renowned journalist, and teams of leading technologists developed an AI customized for the truth discovery efforts of journalism. It allows reporters to ask questions of entire archives, compare records, identify contradictions and pursue connections that might otherwise go unnoticed. Crucially, every sentence of generated response by the AI come with citations of the source from which it is drawn, allowing journalists to return to the original material and verify what the evidence actually says — and to catch the system if it gets something wrong. As the name indicated, the system is rigorously source-based.

That last point is essential. We recognize that artificial intelligence can make mistakes, misunderstand context, and produce convincing but inaccurate assertions. But documents aren’t necessarily truthful just because they are authentic, either. An official report can be misleading. A witness can lie. A financial disclosure can obscure as much as it reveals.

Finding information is only the beginning of journalism. Establishing its credibility, understanding its significance and weaving it into a compelling, fair and accurate narrative require human judgment. Technology can make that process easier, but it cannot substitute for the reporter’s curiosity, skepticism or sense of what makes a story worth telling.

Sourcebase News is where we intend to demonstrate that in practice.

What We Want to Do

Our central mission is to publish original investigative reporting by journalists who use Sourcebase to uncover stories buried in primary documents. These investigations will be reported and written by journalists, not generated by AI. Among our first offerings is an investigation by veteran reporter Marilyn W. Thompson, who used Sourcebase to identify a little-noticed FBI inquiry into threats against Jeffrey Epstein’s victims in records that had already been made public.

We will also publish a daily morning report on what President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social after 9 p.m. the previous evening. The president often uses late-night posts to announce policy, attack opponents and move markets, and readers deserve a careful, contextualized account by morning. AI will produce an initial draft, using our extensive archive of Trump’s statements and social media posts to provide historical context. An experienced human editor will review the reporting, verify claims and determine what is newsworthy before publication. Every report will be labeled as having begun as an AI draft.

Our ambitions extend beyond the journalism we publish ourselves. At a time when newsrooms are shrinking and resources for investigative reporting are increasingly scarce, we want to give talented journalists more opportunities to pursue ambitious stories, including reporters who work independently or at other news organizations. We also intend to highlight important work produced elsewhere with the help of Sourcebase, giving credit to the journalists and institutions responsible for it. When we do, we will disclose any commercial relationship between Sourcebase and the people or organizations involved. Whether someone is a customer will not determine what we feature or how we cover it.

This website, along with our Substack, will be a home for original investigations and overlooked evidence. And we want readers to see the material behind our reporting, rather than simply take our word for it.

Who we are

Sourcebase brings together an unusual mix of journalists and technologists. Our CEO, Ron Suskind, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author whose reporting has exposed the inner workings of government and powerful institutions. Our chief content officer, Glenn Kessler, spent almost three decades at The Washington Post, including nearly 15 years writing The Fact Checker column.

Chief operating officer Winston Chen founded Voice Dream, whose reading software won an Apple Design Award. Chief technology officer John Nguyen, a leader in AI development, co- founded Vlingo, an early developer of voice-recognition software and the virtual assistant. Adam Cheyer, Siri’s inventor, is a longtime technical consultant with Sourcebase, which has developed proprietary technology.

As to ownership, the company’s founder, Suskind, who has five technology patents, is Sourcebase’s major shareholder. Among the minority investors, each with below 10 percent ownership, the five largest – one of which is OpenAI with three percent – all together own 24 percent of the company and have no influence over editorial matters.

We won’t always get everything right. When we make mistakes, we will acknowledge and correct them. Our use of AI doesn’t diminish our responsibility for accuracy and fairness. If anything, it makes those obligations more important.

Our ambition is not to produce more journalism with fewer journalists. It is to make more ambitious journalism possible.

— The Editors, Sourcebase News