How an article happens
What happens between pressing Write and reading your article - the ten editorial desks, in order, and what each one leaves on the record.
Every article Mastheads writes takes the same path, whichever way you asked for it - one topic, a list, a Blueprint, a page you already have, or the autonomous newsroom. One article is one run of the ten editorial desks. Twenty articles are twenty runs, each with its own research.
This page follows one article from the moment you press Write to the moment it lands on your dashboard.
On this page
Before anything is spent
You type a topic, a list or a link. Mastheads shows you a brief and a plan - the suggested headline, the sections, the kind of piece - and you can change any of it. Nothing has been written yet and nothing has been charged.
When you press Write, you see the cost and confirm it. Your account runs up to five articles at the same time. A sixth waits its turn, and shows its place in the line while it waits.
The assignment
The Editorial Director turns your request into a clear assignment before any research or writing starts: who the article is for, what it promises the reader, the angle, the headline, and the questions it has to answer. Every later desk works to that assignment.
The research
The Source Desk searches the web in your words, opens the results and reads every chosen page in full - not a snippet, the whole page. Pages from outlets you have told Mastheads to ignore are never fetched and never cited.
If the web has nothing usable on your topic, or what it finds is about something else, the run stops here. Nothing is written and nothing is charged, and the article tells you why. Declining to write what cannot be sourced is part of the standard, not a failure of it.
The plan
The Planning Desk turns what the sources actually say into a section-by-section plan. It records what each source says, sorts out where sources disagree, and gives each section the facts that support it. An article has at most eight sections.
The writing
The Writers Desk writes the article from that evidence, in your publication's voice - the tone, reading level and point of view you set. Claims link to the page they came from, inside the sentence, the way a reader expects a link to look.
The checking
Three desks then read the draft. Each one fixes what it finds in a single pass and writes down what it did:
- The Fact Desk checks every number, date, name and quotation against the pages that were read. Anything that does not trace to a page is cut or marked for your review.
- The QA Desk checks the article keeps the promise its headline makes, removes filler, and writes an honest search title, description and keywords.
- The Editor-in-Chief reads the whole article fresh, as a reader would, and rewrites weak or crowded paragraphs while keeping every fact and source in place.
The house standard
The Standards Desk reads the finished article against the same house rules every article meets, repairs what it can, and records the measures you see on the article. On a researched article it checks every name against the sources.
If it finds something genuinely risky that it cannot repair, it holds the article as Needs a look instead of calling it ready. See Needs a look below.
The picture
While the words get their final checks, the Art Desk draws an original cover picture for the article. It only works when pictures are turned on for that domain or profile.
Production
The Production Desk puts it all together - the checked text, the picture, the search details and every desk's record - and sends the finished article to your dashboard. You get a notice in the app and an email.
What arrives with the article
Every article shows its work. Open it and you will find:
- The sources it was written from, linked.
- The desks that worked on it. A desk that stood down, or failed at its own job, is shown without a tick - never as if it had done the work.
- Eleven recorded checks - readability, how much text matches a source word for word, banned phrases, paragraph shape, the writer talking about the article, a clean ending, contractions, currency style, quote marks, country spelling, and tone of voice. Each one is a tick, a failure, or "not recorded" when it could not run. It is never a tick by default.
- What the desks could not fix, in each desk's own words, with what it would take to fix it.
- The named byline the article publishes under.
When the sources all come from one outlet, the article ends on a line crediting it: "Originally reported by" and the outlet's name. When two or more outlets covered the story, no single one of them broke it, so the line is left off rather than guessed.
Needs a look
Most articles arrive ready to publish. A small number are held as Needs a look, because something in them could hurt you if it went out unread - for example:
- the article names a person or organisation no source mentions
- the Fact Desk raised a policy concern
- a sentence stops halfway, or the article drifts off its own subject
- a long quotation matches nothing in any source, or none of the article's figures appear in any source
- the article came back in the wrong language
A held article stays in your library with the reasons listed. It is never published automatically. You choose: Regenerate to write it again, or Publish anyway if you have read it and are happy. A held article counts as a written article, because it was written.
With Research off
Research is on by default. Turn it off and there are no fetched pages to work from, so the Source, Planning, Writers and Fact desks stand down and the article is written from the model's own knowledge. Before anything is spent you are asked to confirm, and the finished article is labelled Not source-backed everywhere it appears. It has no citations, because there is nothing to cite.
What costs, and what does not
- A run refused before writing - no usable sources - costs nothing.
- A finished article, ready or held, counts as one article.
- Redrawing a picture or rewriting a passage are paid actions too, and each shows its cost before it runs.
Related: The ten desks · Quality gates and fact-checking · Review and approval