Laura Lee wasn’t planning an investigation when she sent reporter Laura Hackett to check on an empty Ramada Inn in Asheville. Twenty-two months after city officials approved a motel conversion project to house homeless residents, all 113 rooms sat vacant. Lee expected a quick beat story about municipal delays.
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Key Takeaways
- Blue Ridge Public Radio (7 staff) won a Murrow Award using Google Pinpoint.
- A single FOIA dump in Pinpoint surfaced 125 related fraud cases.
- Free AI document tools let small newsrooms punch above their weight.
“I wasn’t thinking of this as an investigative project,” Lee says. “I was thinking of it like a standard story on the beat.”
Blue Ridge Public Radio serves 14 counties and 650,000 people across Western North Carolina with seven reporters plus a news director. As a nonprofit NPR affiliate focused primarily on daily coverage, major investigations strain resources the newsroom can’t easily spare. But early reporting on the Ramada Inn raised questions no daily story could answer. The rushed purchase agreement between Asheville and Shangri-La Industries, a California developer, looked increasingly suspicious.
When Hackett discovered the same developer facing legal troubles in Los Angeles, BPR began searching L.A. County court databases. They uncovered roughly 125 cases—many echoing patterns emerging in Asheville. Documents flooded in: email transcripts from city officials, court records, financial statements tracking shell corporations. Soon the small newsroom was drowning in files without the organizational systems larger news operations take for granted.
Google’s Pinpoint became BPR’s backbone—a free document analysis tool that transformed chaos into searchable archives. The resulting series, “Secret Sauce Expired’: The Ramada Inn Conversion for Asheville’s Unhoused,” won an Edward R. Murrow Award. More importantly, the reporting prevented similar fraud schemes from proceeding in other North Carolina cities.
Discovering Pinpoint while seeking transcription tools
Lee first encountered Pinpoint while searching for radio transcription capabilities. Blue Ridge Public Radio produces audio journalism daily, and transcription tools help reporters quote sources accurately and make broadcast content searchable. Only after experimenting with Pinpoint’s transcription features did Lee realize the platform offered broader document analysis capabilities.
Pinpoint, developed by Google’s News Initiative, uses machine learning and natural language processing to make scanned PDFs, emails, transcripts and other files fully searchable. Users can identify names, organizations, locations and key terms across thousands of pages in seconds. The platform supports bulk uploads, pattern searches, annotation and collaborative sharing.
For BPR’s expanding investigation, these features addressed practical problems immediately. North Carolina’s public records law doesn’t set response deadlines. “We’re sitting in that line for months,” Lee notes. Documents trickled in sporadically—sometimes arriving months after original requests. Traditional filing methods—folders, spreadsheets, manual notes—would have crumbled under the volume and timeline.
“Having it all in that one space and having it searchable… that’s the big leap that Pinpoint makes,” Lee explains. “Especially as you get more and more volume, it’s really like a needle in a haystack. There are times you think, ‘I know this exists because I read it, but it was three days ago, and now I can’t remember which document it’s in.'”
Building a searchable archive as documents accumulated
BPR created a dedicated Pinpoint collection for the investigation, uploading court filings, government emails and financial records as they arrived. The platform’s optical character recognition made scanned documents searchable. Automatic entity extraction identified names, organizations, locations and dates across the growing archive.
This organizational system proved crucial as the investigation stretched across months. When new documents arrived weeks or months after earlier materials, reporters could search the entire collection instantly rather than manually reviewing previous files. Details that seemed insignificant in isolation—obscure company names, minor dates, tangential references—became important when later documents revealed their significance.
The search functionality helped reporters surface connections buried across hundreds of pages. Following a name through court records spanning multiple jurisdictions would have required hours manually. Pinpoint returned results in seconds. “Any investigation is going to yield a lot of paper and not all of it is going to be that helpful,” Lee explains. “But you don’t know that until you go through it.”
During pre-publication legal review, Pinpoint’s archive provided immediate verification. When lawyers or editors asked “How do you know this?” or “Where exactly did that quote come from?”, reporters located original source material instantly. This documentation speed matter for small newsrooms where legal review can bottleneck publication.
Expanding statewide when patterns emerged elsewhere
As BPR’s reporting progressed, team members discovered Shangri-La Industries was pitching similar motel conversion projects in Winston-Salem and Fayetteville—using the Asheville contract as credibility despite making zero actual progress there.
“‘Oh, they’re doing this in Winston-Salem and Fayetteville, too,'” Lee recalls realizing. This discovery prompted collaboration with WFDD in the Piedmont Triad and CityView in Fayetteville. Multiple newsrooms began tracking Shangri-La’s activities across North Carolina.
Pinpoint’s collaborative features enabled this expanded investigation. BPR shared their document collection with partner newsrooms through the platform’s sharing controls. Different reporters could access the archive, search for patterns and cross-reference findings without duplicating work. As scope broadened beyond Asheville, details buried in earlier documents—previously obscure names, minor dates, contractual language—suddenly became significant in the statewide context.
The centralized, searchable archive let reporters surface those connections quickly. Without Pinpoint’s organizational system, coordinating three newsrooms investigating related fraud schemes across different jurisdictions would have overwhelmed the small teams involved.
Publishing findings that prevented additional fraud
In October 2023, BPR published “Secret Sauce’ Expired: The Ramada Inn Conversion for Asheville’s Unhoused”—a three-part series that earned the newsroom an Edward R. Murrow Award. It had immediate impact. Asheville formally cut ties with Shangri-La Industries in January 2024, ending a two-year partnership marked by delays and broken promises.
A local contractor filed suit against Shangri-La for nonpayment. The developer lost the Ramada Inn property to foreclosure. Around the same time, California’s Attorney General filed a $114 million fraud lawsuit against Shangri-La.
The collaborative statewide reporting, published as “Sold on a Promise,” examined how Shangri-La pitched similar deals in other communities using promotional materials showcasing Asheville project renderings—even though no real progress had been made there. “Most of those have fallen through,” Lee says. The reporting helped prevent additional cities from entering similar agreements.
Pinpoint’s role extended beyond organization. The platform became institutional memory for an investigation spanning multiple reporters across months of document collection. New team members could search the archive to understand previous reporting. Complex timelines involving multiple entities remained accessible rather than locked in individual reporters’ notes.
Preparing for Hurricane Helene coverage using lessons learned
BPR has begun investigative coverage of Hurricane Helene’s aftermath. The devastating storm caused billions in damage across Western North Carolina, leaving communities without water or power for weeks. Reporting involves multiple layers of local, state and federal agencies—each generating thousands of emails, contracts and budget records.
Lee thinks Pinpoint can help manage that scale and complexity. Document volumes will likely far exceed even the Ramada Inn investigation. “If you want to be able to tackle a project of this size and scope, you’re going to have to leverage tools,” Lee says. The goal remains freeing time for tasks only journalists can do—”having conversations and being in the community and witnessing things.”
With disaster recovery spanning months or years, having searchable archives will help BPR track whether promises made in crisis actually translate to action. Pinpoint’s organizational capacity addresses the practical challenge small newsrooms face: How to maintain institutional memory when resources barely cover daily reporting, let alone long-term investigations?
The team established their workflow through the Ramada Inn investigation—create collections early, upload documents systematically, use entity extraction to surface connections, collaborate through shared access. These practices will scale to larger investigations because Pinpoint’s architecture supports up to 100,000 documents per collection with unlimited collections per account.
Small newsrooms considering Pinpoint can explore the free platform at journaliststudio.google.com/pinpoint. The tool works best for document-heavy investigations where volume would overwhelm traditional filing systems—exactly the circumstances cash-strapped outlets face when major stories demand investigative depth.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. Pinpoint is free and designed to be accessible to journalists without technical backgrounds. Small newsrooms can use the same powerful search and entity extraction capabilities that large investigative teams use—leveling the playing field for resource-constrained outlets working with FOIA responses, court records, or document-heavy local investigations.
Access requires a journalist Google account obtained through Google’s journalism verification program. The application verifies users are working journalists or news organizations; once approved, access is completely free with no ongoing subscription costs—making it budget-neutral for even the smallest newsroom.
A small newsroom could upload hundreds of pages of a FOIA response, then use Pinpoint’s search to find relevant names, dates, and locations in minutes rather than reading each page manually. This makes document-intensive investigation feasible for a one- or two-person team that couldn’t otherwise handle the volume.
Pinpoint supports multiple languages for OCR and text search, though its named entity recognition performs best in English. Small newsrooms working primarily in other languages should test Pinpoint with sample documents in their target language to assess accuracy before relying on it for a major investigative project.
Documents uploaded to Pinpoint are stored in Google’s cloud infrastructure, accessible only to your account (plus anyone you grant access). Google states Pinpoint data is not used to train its AI models. Journalists uploading highly sensitive documents should consult their legal and security teams before using any cloud-based document tool.
