On Tuesday, Local Angle announced Backfield, an open-source platform that turns news stories into structured data. Local Angle is longtime journalist-developer Chase Davis’s product lab.
Backfield pulls the locations out of articles and geocodes them. It identifies the people in a story and what they said, and it connects people, places and organizations into a knowledge graph built from a newsroom’s own coverage. It tags stories with topics, story formats and user needs, and it embeds them so an archive can be searched by meaning, not only by keyword. But more than just searchability, the project turns articles into something more structured and native to conversational AI.
Davis open-sourced some of the early ideas at the Minnesota Star Tribune in early 2025, as Agate AI, with support from the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program, and refined them in work with Chicago Public Media and the Reynolds Journalism Institute. Backfield is free to run yourself under an Apache 2.0 license, and Local Angle is taking signups for a hosted private beta.
I asked Davis two questions about the release.
Q: Why open source Backfield? Wouldn’t it have been easier and more profitable to keep it private?
Davis: Lots of reasons, but here are three big ones:
One: The idea matters more than the software. The whole game is helping organizations realize all the amazing things they can do if they structure journalism thoughtfully and at scale. It doesn’t really matter how you get there. Do it by hand if you want! My hope is that open sourcing Backfield gives folks a fast and reasonably painless head start. And I’m here to help if they need it.
Two: It’s the right thing to do, considering how the project came together. Backfield has been supported, both directly and indirectly, by nonprofit organizations like the Lenfest Institute and the Reynolds Journalism Institute. It exists largely because of the support and belief of news leaders who care deeply about improving and sustaining our industry — notably among them, Aron Pilhofer at Chicago Public Media. Open sourcing it in some form was always the plan.
Three: Backfield is for builders, and builders are my people. Can you imagine me in a suit, pitching executives on how Backfield can “enhance the unit economics of content creation”? Not only would I be terrible at it, but that’s also just not how I want to spend my time.
What would you like to see people add to or change about Backfield and contribute back?
I passed Backfield around to some friends and collaborators in the weeks before launch, and they graciously uncovered plenty of obvious features I’d failed to implement simply because I hadn’t thought of them. I fixed some of those, but I’m sure there are plenty more. PRs, bugs, issues: Bring it all. Instructions for contributing are in the repo.
But mostly: Build cool things with it, and then please tell me about those things. The platform matters only insofar as it helps organizations find value in the underlying idea — and I believe there’s an enormous amount of value there. Every Backfield user is now part of telling that story.