Creating content

Review and approval

Nothing publishes until you say so. What every article arrives with, what "Needs a look" means, and how publishing on your own schedule works.

Review is the default. Every article Mastheads writes lands on your dashboard first, and nothing reaches your site until you press Publish. Publishing without a person in the loop is something you switch on yourself, per domain, and only for the autonomous newsroom.

On this page

Where finished articles appear

Each finished article goes to your library, filed under the profile or domain you wrote it for. You are told when it is ready:

a notice in the app's notifications, which arrive without a refresh
an email - for a list, one email for the whole run, with its counts ("18 of 20 articles written")

A run that fails is reported the same way, with the reason. You can turn the emails off in your notification settings; the notices in the app always stay.

What to check before you publish

Open the article. Next to the text is the authenticity panel, which shows the article's work:

Sources - the pages it was written from, each linked, and how many it used against how many you asked for. A shortfall shows in amber, never as a pass.
Desks - which of the ten editorial desks worked on it. A desk that stood down or failed at its job has no tick.
Recorded checks - eleven measured checks, from readability to quote marks. Each one is passed, failed, or "not recorded" when it could not run.
What we could not fix - every problem a desk found but could not repair, in the desk's own words, with what it would take to fix it.

The panel is folded by default; its header counts the open problems so you can see at a glance whether there is anything to read.

A quick review usually means three things: read the headline and opening, open two or three sources and check the claims that lean on them, and read anything listed under what could not be fixed.

Ready, or Needs a look

Most articles arrive ready. A few arrive as Needs a look. That label is kept for real risk only - for example, a person named in the article whom no source mentions, a policy concern from the Fact Desk, a sentence that stops halfway, or an article that came back in the wrong language. The reasons are listed on the article.

A held article is never published automatically. You have two choices:

Regenerate - write the article again.
Publish anyway - you have read it, you accept it, and it goes out.

You can also edit the article first, then publish. A held article was written, so it counts as one article from your allowance.

Publishing

When an article is ready and you are happy with it:

Press Publish. The panel tells you first which site it is going to, and whether this creates a new post or updates one already there.
Confirm. The article and its picture go to your site.

If your site does not answer, the article stays a draft here and you are told to publish again when the site is back. If the site might have made the post without confirming it, you are told to check your site before publishing again, so you do not end up with two copies.

No site connected? Export the article instead - see Export and portability.

Publishing without a person: opt-in, per domain

A domain's autonomous newsroom can be set to publish what it writes on its own schedule. It starts on review, and only you can change that. Even with publishing switched on, an article is held back as a draft, with the reason, when:

it is marked Needs a look
the Editor-in-Chief did not approve it
it misses its minimum number of sources
the Fact Desk found a legal risk

AI disclosure

How an article is labelled depends on whether a person reviewed it:

You press Publish. Pressing Publish is your review, so the article text carries no AI label.
The newsroom publishes on its own. Nobody read it first, so the article carries a visible sentence - "This article was created with AI assistance." - in the article's own language, plus a machine-readable marker, as the EU AI Act asks.

Either way, a generated picture always carries a visible credit: "Illustration generated by AI". And an article written with Research off carries a "not source-backed" label wherever it is published.

Who on your team can publish

On a team, publishing is its own permission. The owner decides, per member, whether they may publish and export - separately from whether they may write and spend. A member without it can write and edit articles but cannot send them to your site.