Foundation brief

Spotlight

Give it a lead. Build the investigation trail.

Less than

2%

of newspaper journalism can be characterized as investigative.

That is the accountability gap Spotlight is built for.

Spotlight is an open-source research engine for journalists and researchers to harness AI on investigations. It turns a lead into a structured trail of sources, contradictions, archived evidence, and findings a reporter can verify.

The field has been gutted, at a time when the need to expose corruption, abuse and injustice has never been greater. Investigative work is where journalism creates the most public value, but it is also the work most newsrooms can least afford: slow, technical, risky, and hard to sustain.

I'm building Spotlight so a local reporter, two freelancers, or a small newsroom will be able to pursue investigations that used to be structurally out of reach.

Current version spotlight.buriedsignals.com Open the live prototype

The project

Sovereign infrastructure for sensitive work.

The current version is served as a skill file. I want to build on the success of that first version and turn Spotlight into a web-hosted platform with plug-in database options, so independent media can harness it while building their own knowledge bases for monetization. It will also be available for media to self-host via Docker.

Inference for the project will be served by Apertus 2, fine-tuned for journalism and OSINT, from a Swiss GPU. Confidential leads and sensitive data should not have to pass through foreign AI infrastructure.

Foundation support turns Spotlight from a working prototype into public-interest infrastructure: open tools, transparent methods, newsroom pilots, and a safer way for small teams to investigate in the AI era.

Why

The model is moving from content to intelligence.

The business model for a crumbling media industry is shifting from content to intelligence, from static artifacts to liquid information. Newsrooms need tooling that helps them escape the daily grind of the legacy model: a scalable system that makes investigative work more accessible, provides intelligence, and feeds owned knowledge bases.

I believe this project can help newsrooms transition into a new media ecosystem, harnessing AI for the benefit of all.

About Buried Signals

A media company with its own investigation engine.

I produce public-interest investigations with partner newsrooms, then turn the reporting into video, articles, source companions, and reusable methods. Spotlight sits underneath that work: monitoring, research, source archiving, contradiction checks, and dossier assembly.

The journalism proves the tools. The tools make the journalism repeatable.

buriedsignals.com