This is awesome but the following:

Rather than just managing notes, they could point out to journalists that they haven't got enough evidence to make a given point, or that a certain person or company has not been investigated thoroughly enough? That a certain point is not relevant to the main point of the story?

Perhaps misses the point a little. I think journalists should absolutely have a tool that allows them to instant search research, public records, Lexis Nexus, etc. I think a computer program that tells you whether or not you've succeeded rhetorically is going to be turned off quicker than the grammar checker in Word.

There are a few tools that are architecturally similar (Notebook, Evernote, Scrivener) but none that plug into a database live. It's a cool idea that I think plenty of people could use; I gave it a try ("Google Inc. shocked the world today by declaring war on Lesotho. Sources say that while this is not the first time a company has kinetically expressed hostile intentions against a sovereign nation, it's certainly the most stylish") but since I'm not a journalist, I wasn't sure what their app was supposed to do for me next.