What Sentinel is
Sentinel is an agentic AI monitoring and intelligence platform for INSI member newsrooms, built to protect journalists through moments of heightened risk. Its autonomous AI agents continuously collect from news wires, official government publications, election data and public social platforms; classifies and geolocates what it finds; and turns that stream into alerts, dashboards and scheduled intelligence briefings that editorial and security teams can act on.
Access is by invitation, organisation by organisation. Each newsroom's beats, alerts and briefings are private to it, while the shared corpus of monitored public sources strengthens the picture for everyone.
Who builds it
Sentinel is a project of the International News Safety Institute (INSI), the news industry's coalition dedicated to the safety of journalists and media workers. INSI's members include many of the world's leading news organisations; its work spans safety advisories, training, research and real-time support to newsrooms covering dangerous stories.
INSI built Sentinel on a simple observation: most physical risk to journalists is preceded by visible signals — inflammatory rhetoric, mobilisation, legal and administrative pressure, coordinated online hostility. Watching those signals systematically, and getting them to the right editor in time, is a safety intervention.
How it works
- Collection — autonomous AI agents watch news feeds, official government sources, and public social media, around the clock.
- Enrichment — AI agents analyse every item, tag it to the races, places, actors and safety themes it touches, and score it for relevance.
- Delivery — teams receive threshold-based alerts and scheduled briefs, explore the corpus through dashboards, and can question it directly through Ask Sentinel, an agentic AI assistant that investigates and answers with citations to the underlying evidence.
Access
Sentinel is available to news organisations and partners working with INSI. Access is reserved for INSI members. If your organisation is a member, or would like to become one, contact info@newssafety.org.
Learn more about INSI's wider work at newssafety.org.