How The Kyiv Independent uses Pinpoint to organize war crime evidence
For The Kyiv Independent, reporting on the full-scale invasion of Ukraine is not just about daily news updates; it is about documenting history and accountability. As Ukraine’s leading English-language publication, they often deal with complex investigations that require sifting through immense amounts of unstructured data.
The Challenge: The Fog of War Data Investigative journalism in a war zone creates a massive data management problem. A single story about a specific front-line brigade or a war crime incident might involve:
Audio Files: Hours of recorded interviews with witnesses and soldiers.
Scanned Documents: Photos of official orders or logs found in liberated territories (often non-text PDFs).
Handwritten Notes: Field notes from reporters on the ground.
NGO Reports: Hundreds of pages of PDF reports from international bodies.
Searching for a single name or location across these disconnected formats was manually impossible, risking that crucial connections would be missed.
The Solution: Pinpoint as the "Digital Archivist" Elsa Court and her team are exploring Pinpoint to turn this chaotic "shoe box" of evidence into a searchable database. It allows them to empower quality journalism by letting the tool handle the organization, so reporters can focus on the narrative.
The Workflow:
The Input: The team uploads mixed-media folders—an hour of audio interview, a scanned PDF order, and a text report—into a single Pinpoint collection.
The Action: Pinpoint automatically transcribes the audio and uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to read the text inside the scanned images.
The Search: Instead of listening to the whole hour of audio again, a reporter simply types a commander's name. Pinpoint highlights the exact second that name was spoken in the audio and the page where it was written in the scanned PDF.
The Outcome: Connecting the Dots The result is an investigative "super-search" that reveals hidden connections. A name mentioned by a soldier in an interview (audio) can be instantly cross-referenced with a document found in a different location (image). This transforms isolated pieces of data into corroborated evidence.
Speed: Transcribing an hour of interview takes minutes, not hours.
Accuracy: Ensures no mention is missed due to human fatigue.
Justice: Helps build stronger, evidence-backed stories that can serve as a historical record.