Creating content

Write from your own sources

Already know what the article should be built on? Four ways to hand the desks your own brief, your own links or the sources you picked.

By default the Source Desk goes out and finds the evidence for an article. Sometimes you already have it - a press release, a report, the three pages that matter, or your own notes on what the piece must say. Mastheads has four ways to put your material at the centre of the article.

You have	Use	What the desks do with it
Your own brief and up to 8 links	Dossier	Write from your links and nothing else. No search runs.
A page you already published	From a URL	Write a new article out of it - refreshed, rewritten or written to beat it.
A subject, and you want to choose the sources	Find sources	Show you real sources first; you tick the ones to write from.
Nothing yet	Find ideas	Show you fresh stories; one press starts an article from a story's page.

On this page

Dossier: your brief, your links, nothing else

A Dossier is the way in for a story you already know. You write the brief - the angle, the facts that matter, the points to cover, in the order you want them - and attach up to eight links. Each link is a full https:// address.

What happens next is the opposite of every other way in: no search runs. The links you attached are the whole set of sources. The desks fetch them, read them and cite them. They are not judged against your topic the way a search result would be, because you chose them. You do not need to own them - nobody owns the news site they cite.

Two rules keep this honest:

Your brief is not a source. A fact you state in the brief is written as yours, or left out. It never comes back wearing a citation. Only what the desks read is cited.
A brief with no links is not source-backed. It is written from your brief and the model's knowledge, you confirm that before anything is spent, and the article carries the same "not source-backed" label as any article written with Research off. With nothing to check against, a thin brief invites invention, so this route asks for about 75 words of brief.

See Dossier for the full guide.

From a URL: start from a page you have

Point the desks at a page and they write a new article from it - a refresh of your own ageing post, a rewrite, or a new article written to outperform it. With one address, the page is read back to you before you spend anything, so you can see what was actually found. See From a URL.

Find sources, then Write from these

Find sources runs the Source Desk on its own, without spending an article: type a few words and see the real pages it would write from. Tick the ones you want and press Write from these. The pages you ticked become the article's priority sources, and the article is built on that many sources - the number you ticked is the number it uses.

Find ideas, then Write about this

With nothing in mind, open Ideas from the writing surface. Pick where and in what language, and optionally a section. One press shows up to eight fresh stories. Write about this fills in the story as your topic and sends its page to the desks as the article's priority source. See Find ideas.

Sources you never want used

Every domain keeps a list of outlets to ignore - paywalled sites, a competitor, anywhere you do not want cited. An ignored outlet is never fetched and never cited, whichever way in you use. Set it in the domain's Article defaults.