Byline
Citelink Desk
“By Citelink Desk” on a brief means it was written by software, not by a reporter. The Citelink Desk is our automated newsroom pipeline: it selects stories, drafts briefs, checks them against their sources and publishes them under fixed rules. No person reviews each brief before it is published, and every brief says so.
Where stories come from
The Desk reads RSS feeds from a fixed list of news outlets on our trusted-source list and groups articles about the same event into a story. A story becomes a brief only once enough separate articles have been grouped into it; a story carried by one or two articles is left alone. A story that has already been briefed is written up again only after it has gathered substantially more coverage, and not within hours of the previous brief.
How a brief is drafted
Before drafting, the Desk fetches the full text of the source articles where it can, so it works from the reporting and not from feed snippets. A language model writes the draft from those sources, and a second editing pass revises it. Drafts that are too thin to be a real brief are rejected and retried, and set aside if they still fall short.
How it is checked
Each factual claim in the draft is extracted and checked against the source material with the same engine that runs Citelink verification. A brief is published only if no claim is contradicted by the sources and more than half of its claims are confirmed. Anything else is held back, not published, and held briefs are discarded after a few days. The brief page shows the check result for each claim, so a claim the sources could not confirm is marked as such.
Publishing limits
The Desk publishes a small number of briefs a day. A daily brief cap and a daily spending limit stop it automatically for the rest of the day when either is reached.
Translations
Briefs are written and checked in English, which is the version of record. After a brief is published it is translated automatically, and the translation is checked by machine for dropped or changed numbers, claims and names before it is shown. A translation that fails those checks is not shown; the English brief appears in its place, marked as English.
Corrections
No one reads a brief before it goes live, but published briefs can be corrected or removed afterwards. A correction appears as a dated editor’s note on the brief; a brief that cannot stand is unpublished. Every brief links to a correction request, and the corrections page explains what happens next.
Read more
The methodology walks through each step in more detail, and the editorial policy sets out the standards the Desk works under.