Your brief. Your links. Nothing else.
Here is a request I kept getting and kept saying no to.
"I have the material. I do not need you to research it. I need it written from this, and only this."
Every way into Mastheads used to start with a search. Type a topic, paste a list, point it at a page, and the first thing the desks do is go and find out what is true about it. That is the right default. It is also the wrong answer to that request, because the person making it is not short of sources. They have a client brief with the facts in it. They have the three reports the piece has to rest on. They have the two pages everyone in the meeting had open. The last thing they want is a tool that nods at their material and then goes looking for its own.
So there is now a door with no search behind it.
What a brief is
Dossier takes two things: a brief and up to eight reference links.
The brief is written the way you would brief a person. The angle. The facts that matter. The points you want covered, in the order you want them. It sets the through-line, and the outline is built around it. Length is not the point. Specifics are.
I want to be precise about what a brief is not, because the temptation is obvious. It is not a prompt. You are not instructing a model. You are handing an assignment to a desk, and what the desk takes from it is the angle and the points the article is built around. That is what a brief sets. If you write "make it punchy" in the brief, you have spent words on something the brief does not set. Write the facts instead.
What the links are
The links become the article's sources. Each one is fetched, read and cited.
Two things are different about them compared with every other way in. First, they are never judged against the topic the way a search result is. A search result has to earn its place. A link you attached has already earned it, because you chose it. Second, you do not have to own them. Nobody owns the news site they cite.
And then the rule that gives this door its name: no search runs. What you attached is the whole source set. Not the starting point for a search, not a hint about what to look for. The whole set. If you attached three pages, the article is written from three pages, and the surface says so before you send it.
Your brief is not a source
This is the rule I care about most, and it is the one that makes the rest of it safe.
A fact you assert in your brief is written as yours, or it is left out. It never comes back wearing a citation. What is cited is what was read.
The reason is the same reason this product exists. The one thing Mastheads claims is that what is sourced is sourced. A customer who writes a figure into their own brief must not get that figure back with a footnote on it, because the footnote would be a lie, and it would be the kind of lie that is very hard to catch later. So the brief sets what the article says, and the links set what it can prove. The two are kept apart on purpose.
That is the difference between writing from your material and laundering it.
Without links
You can send a brief with no links at all, and it still writes. That article comes from your brief and the model's knowledge. Nothing in it is source-backed, and three things happen because of that: it asks you before it spends anything, the article carries the same disclosure as every other run without sources, and it wants a fuller brief first. A thin brief with no sources is how invention gets your framing, and attaching a page does not fix that. The links say what to write from. The brief says what to write.
What it is for
The client brief that already contains the facts. The internal report that has to become a readable piece without adding anything. The article that must rest on three named documents and nothing else, because a reader will check.
New accounts get ten articles over seven days, free, with no card. If you have the material, hand it over and watch what it refuses to add.