SteerNote
A real-time AI research companion for investigative journalists and graduate-student researchers that lets you steer mid-investigation ('focus on the lawsuit,' 'skip to the financials') without losing progress, and fork from any checkpoint to try a different angle.
Investigative journalists and graduate-student researchers running long, multi-source investigations
- Mid-research steering that redirects the AI without restarting the search
- Fork-from-checkpoint to try alternate angles and compare resulting briefs side by side
- Auto-cited brief output where every claim links to the underlying source
- Source-vetting badges (court record, peer-reviewed, wire, social) so claims can be weighted by trust
Existing AI research tools force full restarts when a researcher pivots, which is exactly when investigations get interesting.
Real adoption momentum: IRE publishes curated '10 AI tools for investigative journalists' list and GIJN runs an annual top-tools roundup, while Elicit alone claims 2M+ researcher users; however CNTI's 2026 briefing flags that the individual nature of investigations slows AI tool uptake.Work smarter, dig deeper: 10 AI tools for investigative journalists ↗AI Applications in Investigative Journalism - Center for News, Technology & Innovation ↗GIJN's Top Investigative Tools of 2025 ↗
General AI-research space is crowded (Elicit, Consensus, NotebookLM, Perplexity, ResearchRabbit, Scite, Iris.ai all position for researchers/journalists), but a web search for 'checkpoint/branch AI research assistant forking investigation' returned zero hits, indicating the steer-mid-investigation + fork-from-checkpoint mechanic is unoccupied.Best AI Tools for Investigative Journalists (67) ↗GIJN's Top Investigative Tools of 2025 ↗
Strong willingness to pay is documented: Elicit's published tiers run $10/mo Plus → $49/mo Pro → $169/mo Scale for academia, and Narrative Post reports investigative-report budgets are up ~15% YoY since 2024; grad students are price-sensitive but institutional buyers (libraries, newsrooms) are paying.Pricing | Elicit: The AI Research Assistant ↗Investigative Journalism: 2026 Resurgence & AI Impact ↗
Investigative journalism and graduate research are durable markets, and AI-augmented research is a multi-year secular trend, but the specific steerable/forking UI is a UX pattern that could be absorbed by incumbents (NotebookLM, Elicit) once it proves out.GIJN's Top Investigative Tools of 2025 ↗Leveraging AI and Technology to Investigate Power ↗
Doable on top of existing frontier LLMs (Claude/GPT-4) with agentic streaming + persistent state, but non-trivial: requires reliable context preservation across long investigations, branching state management, and careful UX to avoid LLM hallucination drift during mid-stream pivots.Pricing | Elicit: The AI Research Assistant ↗