How Blue Ridge Public Radio used Pinpoint to turn a motel mystery into an award-winning investigation
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When Blue Ridge Public Radio News Director Laura Lee sent a reporter to investigate an empty Ramada Inn in Asheville, she expected a quick daily story. Instead, the tip led to a multi-year probe into a stalled “motel conversion” project, thousands of public records and a statewide collaboration.
Pinpoint, Google’s free document analysis tool, became the backbone of BPR’s workflow, turning a flood of emails, contracts and court filings into a searchable, shareable archive. The resulting series, “‘Secret Sauce Expired’: The Ramada Inn Conversion for Asheville’s Unhoused,” won an Edward R. Murrow Award and helped shape policy decisions across North Carolina.
Three reasons to use Pinpoint
- Pinpoint turned chaos into searchable archives. BPR’s investigation flooded their small newsroom with court filings, emails and financial records. Pinpoint’s search functionality surfaced connections that would have been buried in traditional filing systems.
- Collaboration became effortless. As BPR’s investigation expanded statewide, Pinpoint made it easy to collaborate with other newsrooms. Shared collections and search tools helped reporters spot patterns without duplicating work.
- Long-term memory for complex investigations. With public records trickling in over the course of months and the story developing over time, Pinpoint became an institutional memory — helping reporters recall key names and events from documents reviewed months earlier.
Newsroom overview
Blue Ridge Public Radio is an NPR affiliate serving 14 counties and nearly 650,000 people across Western North Carolina. The newsroom comprises seven reporters plus a news director, focusing primarily on daily reporting.
“Asheville is the major metropolitan area in our region, but we cover a whole lot of places that are not Asheville too,” says Lee. As a nonprofit newsroom, major investigative projects are rare due to resource constraints.
Problem: Document dumps
In 2021, Asheville city officials approved a “motel conversion project” at an old Ramada Inn to provide housing for the city’s homeless population. But 22 months later, the 113 rooms were still vacant.
Lee sent reporter Laura Hackett to investigate what appeared to be a stalled project. “I wasn’t thinking of this as an investigative project,” Lee says. “I was thinking of it like a standard story on the beat.”
Early reporting raised more questions than answers about the rushed purchase agreement between the City of Asheville and Shangri-La Industries, a California-based developer. When Hackett discovered legal troubles involving the same developer in Los Angeles, the team began searching L.A. County court databases and uncovered around 125 cases — many echoing what was unfolding in Asheville.
Documents continued to pour in: email transcripts from city officials, court records and financial statements tracking various shell corporations and LLCs. Soon, BPR was drowning in files.
“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.”
The investigation presented a classic challenge for small newsrooms: How to organize and make sense of thousands of documents without the resources of a large news organization?
Solution: Organizing with Pinpoint
Lee first discovered Pinpoint while seeking a transcription tool for BPR’s radio work. Only after experimenting with transcription features did she realize the platform’s broader capabilities for document analysis.
Pinpoint is a research tool developed by the Google News Initiative to help journalists analyze large document collections. It 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, upload documents in bulk, search for patterns, annotate findings and share collections with collaborators.
Traditional methods — filing folders, taking notes in spreadsheets — would have crumbled under the volume. Pinpoint offered a different approach.
“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.'”
The search functionality became especially crucial as the investigation stretched on. North Carolina’s public records law doesn’t set specific deadlines for agencies to respond to requests. “We’re sitting in that line for months,” Lee notes — documents trickled in sporadically, sometimes months after the original requests.
Without Pinpoint’s organizational system, connecting new documents to earlier findings would have been nearly impossible. The platform helped the team keep their growing pile of records in a single shared workspace, allowing different reporters to access and cross-reference materials easily.
During the pre-publication phase, Pinpoint proved helpful in the legal review process. When lawyers or editors asked, “How do you know this?” or “Where exactly did that quote come from?,” the reporting team could quickly locate the original document for verification.
Impact: Statewide investigation
In October 2023, Lee’s team published “Secret Sauce’ Expired: The Ramada Inn Conversion for Asheville’s Unhoused,” a three-part investigative series that earned the newsroom an Edward R. Murrow Award.
The investigation’s impact was immediate: Asheville formally cut ties with Shangri-La Industries in January 2024, ending a two-year partnership marked by delays. A local contractor filed a lawsuit against Shangri-La for nonpayment, and the developer subsequently lost the Ramada Inn property to foreclosure. Around the same time, Shangri-La became the subject of a $114 million fraud lawsuit filed by the California Attorney General.
The investigation also revealed that Shangri-La Industries was attempting similar projects in other North Carolina cities, using their Asheville contract as a credibility boost.
“‘Oh, they’re doing this in Winston-Salem and Fayetteville, too,'” Lee recalls realizing. “It made us reach out to our colleagues in other newsrooms across the state.” This led to collaborative efforts with outlets including WFDD in the Piedmont Triad and CityView in Fayetteville.
The resulting series, “Sold on a Promise,” examined how Shangri-La and its nonprofit partner, Step Up, pitched similar motel conversion deals in other communities, often using promotional materials that showcased renderings of the Asheville project, even though no real progress had been made there. The reporting helped prevent similar projects from moving forward.
“Most of those have fallen through,” Lee says.
Pinpoint played a crucial role in enabling this kind of expanded investigation. As the scope of the story broadened beyond Asheville, details previously buried in earlier documents — names, dates and obscure references — suddenly became significant within the statewide context.
Because all their records were searchable and centralized in Pinpoint, the BPR team could easily surface those details, draw new connections and stay on top of the fast-moving story.
Security and privacy: Cloud-based considerations
For most newsrooms, Pinpoint’s security setup should be sufficient. Google states that data uploaded to Pinpoint isn’t used as training data, and the platform maintains the same security standards as Gmail or Google Docs. The practical rule of thumb: If you’re comfortable sending a document via email, it’s fine to upload it to Pinpoint.
For BPR’s investigation, security considerations were straightforward. The documents — public records, court filings, government emails — were already part of the public domain or would become so through their reporting.
Still, it’s essential to understand Pinpoint’s limitations. While its search features can help organize document sets, they’re not a substitute for human analysis. Pinpoint is not capable of summarizing findings or drawing conclusions, and journalists still need to interpret what they find. Pinpoint has made Generative AI tools available in Beta, but the reliability of those tools is unclear at this stage.
Verdict: Essential for document-heavy investigations
The team has begun investigative coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, a devastating storm that caused billions in damage and left parts of Western North Carolina without water or power for weeks. It’s a daunting task involving 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. With document volumes expected to far exceed even the Ramada Inn investigation, having a searchable, collaborative tool is essential. Pinpoint can help them track the paper trail, connect the dots across jurisdictions, and ensure that promises made in the wake of disaster are kept
Small-to-medium newsrooms facing document-heavy investigations would benefit from BPR’s approach, particularly those covering multiple jurisdictions or lacking dedicated investigative teams that are comfortable with cloud-based tools and Google Workspace.
Lee’s advice for other small newsrooms: “If you want to be able to tackle a project of this size and scope, you’re going to have to leverage tools.” The goal is to free up time for the tasks that only journalists can do — “having conversations and being in the community and witnessing things.”
Alternatives
DocumentCloud offers the most newsroom-specific alternative, with enhanced annotation and collaboration tools designed explicitly for journalists. The free service includes self-hosted options for organizations with strict data security requirements.
Datashare, which offers maximum privacy control, provides a compelling option as a free, open-source tool built by ICIJ specifically for investigative journalism. Its self-hosted capabilities keep sensitive documents under complete organizational control, while advanced graph visualization helps reporters connect entities and collaborative features support team investigations.
OpenRefine, a free, open-source data cleaning and transformation tool, excels at structured data extraction from documents. While it requires more technical skill than Pinpoint, it offers greater control over data processing workflows.
Datasette rounds out the options as a free tool for exploring and publishing datasets, making document collections both searchable and shareable with the public. Like OpenRefine, Datasette requires some technical setup but provides highly customizable solutions for newsrooms with development resources.
Traditional methods: File folders and spreadsheets work for smaller investigations but quickly become unwieldy with document volumes exceeding a few dozen files.
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