“Paolo, Sonia, Anna, and hundreds of other people are calm at the Bologna station. Then at 10:25, everything explodes, and their lives change forever. But who is behind this explosion?”

So begins a special, six-part podcast series titled “10 and 25: The True Story Behind the Bologna Massacre.” The report was produced by investigative journalists for Slow News, an online Italian news outlet founded in 2014 and dedicated to long-form storytelling.

Background: On August 2, 1980, a bomb exploded at the Bologna train station, killing 85 people and injuring over 200. The bombing was labeled a terrorist attack by a neo-fascist group, and five men were convicted of the crime.

Decades later, Slow News Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief Alberto Puliafito, decided to revisit the event to investigate remaining questions and theories about the deadliest terrorist attack in Italy’s history. To thoroughly research the crime, he’d need to pore through thousands of scanned pages of historical documents from courts, libraries, newspapers, and other original sources. Until recently, such exhaustive research would have been too time-consuming and costly, and therefore prohibitive.

Puliafito was looking for AI tools to relieve journalists of the manual tasks involved in manually sorting and analysing documents – freeing them up to bring “the human element” to their stories.

Puliafito combined his experience in both journalism and as a Google Teaching Fellow in Italy with new digital skills learnt from his participation in Google workshops. For the Bologna massacre podcast, he wanted to not only find and analyse documents related to the crime but also create an organised archive available to the public.

“Among all the things that convinced me to do this project is the idea that [journalists] must enable people to follow in their footsteps and must open – when possible and when it does not endanger a source – their archive of information,” he says.

Puliafito was already using Pinpoint, a research tool powered by Google Search and AI technology to help journalists and academics explore and analyse large collections of documents. “Pinpoint is one of the tools I use in my daily job as a journalist,” he says. “We needed a tool to organise and dig into the sources. We also wanted to create a public repository not only with the digital documents but also with the interviews our team was doing, to add a personal human touch. It was very clear we needed a tool like Pinpoint.”

The Slow News team used Pinpoint to upload roughly 1,500 scanned documents (some up to 300 pages long) to Google Drive. They then used Pinpoint’s entity recognition capability to search texts for names, businesses, and places; and optical character recognition (OCR) to extract text from images. They also used the tool’s speech-to-text technology to transcribe audio files, converting them into searchable text files along with the collection of scanned and handwritten documents. (View the 10 and 25 documents collection on Pinpoint.)

“Before we created this repository on Pinpoint, these documents were spread across different archives, different repositories,” Puliafito explains. “So, this is the very first time in 45 years that you can find everything related to the Bologna massacre in one place. Now, the audience can join the journalists on their path to their investigation.”

After conducting a crowdfunding campaign to engage sponsors (over 250 subscribers donated an average of 32 euros each and were rewarded with early access to the archive), Slow News launched the “10 and 25” podcast on August 2, 2024. They enticed audience members “to follow a series of concentric circles, from the smallest to the largest, the one that escapes, following what is always followed in a journalistic investigation – money. To arrive at a final revelation.”

The “10 and 25” podcast was a successful storytelling medium for Slow News, ranking in the Top 10 Spotify podcasts in Italy and one of their best “true crime” podcasts of the year. The “10 and 25” podcast also won the best independent information podcast award at the Italiani Podcast Awards 2025 and was among five finalists at the Wan Ifra Awards 2025 in the "Best Use of Audio" category.

The series garnered an average review of 4.9 stars, with 207,800 plays on Spotify; 193,500 hours of listening; 8,455 followers; and episodes enjoying peak audience retention rates of over 90 percent. The podcast’s popularity has endured, with more than 55,000 impressions for the week marking a year since the series launched.

“Pinpoint helped us engage our audience by granting supporters early access to the archive, so they could do their own research,” Puliafito adds, noting that crowdfunding support from 250 donors helped the publisher archive 1,500 historical documents totalling 100,000 pages. “It helped us make a story current from 45 years ago. I'm happy to see that the audience wants to follow the path of the journalists and to dig into the sources themselves.”

“Journalists can learn to use AI tools to free up their time for the human part of the job,” he says. “Talking with and creating relationships with sources, connecting the dots, going out into the field, and seeing with their eyes – you can't delegate that to a digital tool. My proposal is to use AI tools like Pinpoint to speed up the process and to be more human.”