The ways in

Dossier

Hand over your own brief and up to eight links, and the desks write from that material and nothing else. No search runs.

Every other way in sends the Source Desk out to find the evidence. A Dossier does the opposite: you hand over the material, and the desks write from that and nothing else. No search runs.

Use it when you already know the story - a product launch with its press release, a report you want covered, a local event with the pages that reported it, an update to your own announcement.

On this page

What you give it

A brief - what the article should say.
Up to 8 links - the pages the article is written from.

Already have it in a document? Upload it, and Mastheads splits it into a brief and links for you to check.

Write the brief the way you would brief a writer

The angle, the facts that matter, the points you want covered, in the order you want them. The brief sets the article's through-line, and its plan is built around it. Length is not the point - specifics are.

Angle: our new opening hours are a response to what parents asked for.
Cover: the new hours from 1 November, the survey of 400 parents behind
them, the Saturday morning session, and how to book.
Tone: friendly, local, short.

Attach your links

One full https:// address per box, up to eight. These pages are the article's sources: the desks fetch them, read them and cite them.

They are not judged against your topic the way a search result is, because you chose them.
No other pages are added. What you attach is the whole source set.
You do not need to own them. Nobody owns the news site they cite.

Each address must be one we can actually reach. A broken link is caught before anything is spent, rather than the article being written from fewer sources than you chose.

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. What is cited is only what was read.

Think of it this way: the links say what to write from. The brief says what to write.

With no links, it is not source-backed

You can send a brief with no links at all. That article is written from your brief and the model's own knowledge. Because there is nothing to check it against, Mastheads:

asks you to confirm before anything is spent
asks for a brief of about 75 words, because a thin brief with nothing to check against invites invention in your framing
labels the finished article not source-backed, on the article and wherever it is published

What comes back

One article, written through the ten editorial desks, built on your links. You do not need to write a headline - the desks write one from your brief, and you can change it in the editor. The Fact Desk checks every number, date, name and quotation against the pages you attached, exactly as it would against pages it found itself.

Dossier or From a URL?

Dossier - write from these pages and nothing else.
From a URL - start from this page, and let the desks research around it.