ANGLE 50 — a Québec newsroom built like a product.
A French-language publication for readers 50 and older. Its assistant retrieves documents and shows the references used; those references do not guarantee every statement.
The problem we set
The project explores how a small newsroom can offer an AI assistant while showing the documents behind its answers and naming its limitations.
Retrieval comes before generation. If the service is unavailable, no answer is generated. When no relevant passage is found, the assistant must say that the base cannot confirm the requested fact.
The assistant
- Hybrid retrieval. BGE-M3 and BM25 combine meaning and exact terms.
- Reranking. A BGE cross-encoder ranks candidate passages before generation.
- Generation. The model receives passages, identifiers and metadata, including associated URLs, and must return the identifiers of the sources used.
- Reference checks. Unknown identifiers are rejected. Displayed links are resolved from retrieved metadata; this does not validate every claim in an answer.
The stack
Publishing
Static pages generated with Node.js and served by Cloudflare Workers, without a content-management system.
Domain & mail
Cloudflare handles the domain, DNS, HTTPS certificate and email routing.
Retrieval
The retrieval service runs on a separate local machine, behind an authenticated Cloudflare Tunnel.
Measurement
Cloudflare Analytics Engine records aggregated pageviews without application cookies, reader identifiers or stored IP addresses in the application code.
What we deliberately left out
The newsroom code includes no advertising pixels or analytics cookies. Its privacy page explains technical processing and how questions are sent to the assistant service.
The illustrations are generated with AI. A site-wide credit explains their origin and that they do not represent real scenes.
Limits we accept
For the current test, DeepSeek drafts the response after local retrieval. Replies are not reviewed by the newsroom; a valid reference is not a guarantee of factual accuracy.
F51 Labs · Montréal · f51labs.com · angle50.ca