The nine desks

Every article runs the same nine desks, in the same order, whichever door it came through. An Assignment row, a Blueprint combination and a Dossier all become one run of the same pipeline. They differ only in how the brief is assembled before it starts.

The sequence is the point. Each desk hands its work to the next one, and the one after it can see what the one before did.

1. Source Desk

Finds and vets real sources to write from. Given your topic or headline it plans searches, runs them, fetches what comes back, judges each candidate against the specific story, and re-queries when it is not satisfied.

What it is judging for is whether a page is actually about your story: the same event, the right date window, real substance. It works in the topic's own language, so this is not an English-only capability.

2. Standards Desk

Checks the angle before anything is planned around it.

3. Planning Desk

Reads what the Source Desk found and builds the brief the writer works from: a resolved title, the angle, the H2 and H3 outline, and the key points, each one tied to a specific source.

Those citations carry the real source URLs forward, which is what lets the next desk link to the pages we actually read rather than to decorative finds.

4. Writers Desk

Turns the brief into the finished piece: a deck, a jump-link table of contents, the headings from the outline, the prose, inline links with natural anchor text, lists, and a real conclusion.

Links are validated after writing. Any URL that is not in the vetted source set is stripped, so a citation cannot be fabricated even if the model tries.

5, 6 and 7. Fact, QA and Editor-in-Chief

The three reading desks. They edit the article rather than grading it. Each one reads the piece, applies specific fixes, and passes it on.

• Fact Desk verifies the claims against the sources they came from.
• QA Desk judges whether the piece is worth sending to a live website: structure as commissioned, readability, reader value, completeness. It also writes the SEO title and description, because working out the search intent is what it just did anyway.
• Editor-in-Chief does the final read, over the result of the two before it - and can revert an upstream edit it disagrees with.

Three rules bound what any of them may do:

• A heading is untouchable. The editable unit is a paragraph. No reading desk can rewrite, rename, reorder, add or drop a heading. That is what makes a pinned outline a promise: the structure you set in a Blueprint or an Assignment comes back exactly as you wrote it.
• An edit cannot introduce a source. Every applied edit is re-rendered through the same link rules the writer works under, so a desk cannot add a URL nobody fetched, and the article's link budget cannot grow through an edit.
• A desk that errors never blocks the article. It is recorded as a non-pass rather than dropped, and never inferred into a pass.

8. Art Desk

Draws the image and writes its alt text. It works on its own thread, alongside the reading desks rather than after them, so the picture is not what the article is waiting on.

9. Production Desk

Seals the piece and hands it on for delivery.

What a desk finding does

The reading desks repair rather than refuse. A desk that finds a problem fixes what it can and records what it could not, so an article is not thrown away over a fault that was fixable.

What a finding never does is disappear. It is recorded against the article and it reaches you: any gate can hold an article back for your review, and a held article costs you one click to approve, edit, or discard. The judgement stays yours, and nothing ships silently.

When a newsroom publishes with nobody in the loop, those same findings are read by the publishing gate instead, and that gate fails closed. An unrecorded check, an unresolved Editor-in-Chief verdict, or a claim the Fact Desk flagged as a legal risk all hold the article as a draft and say why.

Related: Quality gates and fact-checking · Review and approval · The ways in