The rundown is yours
Change your mind before 05:00.
Reorder, promote, demote. Veto a story for today or spike it for good. Pull one from the near-miss pool. Edit the angle or a segment, or rewind an approved edition.
See how it works
- Reorder, promote to main, demote to the tail
- Veto for today; spike forever
- Pull a story the desk left out, with its reason
- Edit the one-line angle that steers how a story is written
- Edit or regenerate a segment
- Rewind an approved edition
The rundown is prepared overnight. Until the deadline it is yours; one approval locks it and writes the script.
It remembers
Yesterday's story does not come back.
Already-covered stories are suppressed. Follow-ups are framed as follow-ups. Spiked stories never return. A hard age gate keeps old news out.
See how it works
- Suppress a story already covered
- Frame a follow-up as a follow-up
- Keep spiked stories out for good
- Refuse stories older than a limit you set
Every candidate the desk considered is recorded with why it made or missed the cut. The near-miss pool is that record.
Two ways to run
Full auto, or nothing ships without you.
Full auto gathers at the start hour, builds the rundown and, at the deadline, scripts, checks, fixes, produces and publishes at 05:00. Gated prepares and waits.
See how it works
- Set the start hour, the deadline and the air days
- Run gated: no approval, no episode
- Read the morning report: what ran, what was fixed, what held
- Let a curator co-pilot propose a rundown beside the desk's
The two modes share one pipeline. The only difference is who holds the gate at the deadline.
Guardrails
Flagged claims are fixed or dropped, never shipped.
A second model reads every script for defamation risk, attribution gaps and characterisation, and attaches the smallest fix. Roughly thirty objectivity rules govern the writing. A length guard keeps five minutes five.
See how it works
- See every flag with its minimum fix
- Unattended: fixable flags are applied; an unfixable one drops the story, not the edition
- Keep every claim attributed
Guardrails run before produce, on every edition, in both modes.
Your desk, your algorithm
Tell the desk what matters here.
Sources you add. Weights across materiality, relevance, novelty, breadth, actionability, corroboration, source authority and freshness. Bars a story must clear. Beats with caps. Trust tiers.
See how it works
- Add sources; set trust tiers: trade, mainstream, wire, press release
- Weight what rises
- Set the bar to lead and the bar to be mentioned
- Name beats and cap how many mains each may hold
- Watch named competitors; exclude what never airs
Rules are plain sentences that map to the desk's knobs.
Regulation in the EU can lead. Celebrity endorsements never lead. Sustainability is a beat, one main a day at most. Our own company is never covered from outside sources, only through Inside. Trade press outranks national press for us.
Your brand, your voice
Your name in the intro, your names said right.
Edition name and colour. Produced intro and outro. A choice of anchor. Tone, dos and don'ts, forbidden words. A pronunciation dictionary you can audition.
See how it works
- Name the edition; pick its colour
- Produced bookends with your name
- Choose the anchor
- Set tone, dos and don'ts, and words the desk never uses
- Add pronunciations and hear them before they air
Identity is set once at the desk and carried by every edition.
Inside
Forward it to your desk.
Each desk has an address. Forward the memo, the townhall recap, the press release. It takes its place in the rundown under the blend rule, read as written when it must be.
See how it works
- Forward items by email
- Choose the blend: industry first, inside first, or the desk decides
- Mark an item read as written
Inside items pass the same gate as everything else. Read-as-written items are never rewritten.
About you
You stay in control of the narrative.
The desk reads what the trade and the press say about your company too. Every story that mentions you is flagged before it airs: keep it, screen it, or drop it. Outside noise never becomes the inner narrative unless you say so.
See how it works
- See every story that mentions your company, flagged before it airs
- Keep: it airs as written, attributed
- Screen: held for your approval
- Drop: it never airs
- Set the rule once: never from outside sources, only through Inside
Mentions are matched against the desk's scored pool before the rundown is locked. Your version of the story comes in through Inside, read as written.
A restructuring story in the trade press this morning. Flagged. Your call.
Your mix
Rank the news that tones the edition.
Ten categories: competitor moves, markets and demand, innovation and launches, financial results, stock movements, regulation and policy, people and leadership, sustainability, consumer and shopper trends, hiring and labour. Each one Lead, Include or Mute.
See how it works
- Lead: the category rises to the top of the rundown
- Include: it competes on weight
- Mute: it never airs
- Change the mix any day
Lead maps to a named beat with a cap; Mute maps to an exclusion. The desk ranks inside the rules you set.
Competitor moves and regulation lead. Stock movements muted.
Delivered, and seen
Any app, no login, numbers by Friday.
A private feed in any podcast app. An edition page with the transcript, embeddable in the intranet. A social clip per edition for the internal network. A listening report per edition.
See how it works
- Private feed link and setup instructions
- Edition page with transcript and show notes
- Social clip per edition
- Listening report per edition
Published at 05:00. The report follows.
Where the desk sits
- Intranet audio summaryReads your own memo back to you.
- Agency podcastProduced, company only, weekly, priced per episode.
- The internal newsletterBoth worlds, written by hand, unread.
- Hosting platformsAn empty pipe. You still have to make the show.
- The monitoring digestText, industry only, forwarded and skimmed.
- Fivewire NewsdeskBoth, every morning
Priced by cadence, not by seats.
Request a demo desk