2. The four questions

Every package must answer, in labeled blocks:

1. What happened?
2. Why did it happen?
3. What can be learned from it?
4. What risks or opportunities emerge from it?

If a draft cannot fill those from sources, it does not publish. Headlines are not the product. Packages are.

3. Daily loop (20–40 minutes)

1. Open the News Desk. Read the tip queue.
2. For each new tip, press Vet. The clerk drafts a package and a confidence score. This spends a little AI quota. Do not vet junk twice.
3. Read the flags. If confidence is under 70, or sources are empty, either decline or go find a primary record (OSHA, WisDOT, DNR, NTSB, BLS, CISA, NOAA, city notice).
4. If the package is yours — a story you wrote — still vet it. You are not above the clerk.
5. Press Send to review, then read the four blocks as if you were a hostile shop steward. Fix in the next version; for now, publish or decline.
6. Publish only what you would sign. Decline the rest. Declined is not deleted. The ledger keeps the no.
7. Walk the front page. If it looks like a blog, you over-published.

4. Weekly (one hour)

• One history comparison. One jobs brief. One local Wisconsin package.
• Check that every published story still has working source links.
• Search the Archives for a root cause before you print a cousin of a story already in the box.
• Export the week when export ships. Until then, the archive page is the copy.
• Do not chase war live-blogs. If a world event has a primary record and a lesson, it can wait for a package.

5. Source doctrine

Prefer primary records: OSHA, NTSB, CISA, NHTSA, FAA, CDC, EPA, NOAA, USGS, NASA, BLS, EIA, Federal Register, WisDOT, DNR, DHS, PSC, county emergency management, city notices. Wire copy may be cited as secondary color, never as the spine of Happened. Short quotes. No scraping a newspaper and rewriting it.

6. Your own stories

Write the tip in the desk form as if you were a stranger. Include the source URL. Vet. Then publish under your own name in the kicker later if you want a byline field — the first edition does not sell personality. It sells the package. Community tips that pass 90 later can be marked Verified Community Submission. Until that stamp exists, they are just packages with origin “community.”

7. Keeping it low-maintenance

• Do not add a second desk. Eight agents was theater. One clerk, one human.
• AI is user-started: Vet and Ask. Never on page load.
• Archives search is the bound-volume index. Keywords always work. Meaning-search needs the same clerk key already used for Vet (XAI_API_KEY on Vercel). No Hugging Face in the press.
• Domain is thewisconbell.com. Lock the desk (publisher sign-in) before the public finds /desk.
• Sample edition stories are standing briefs. Replace them with dated local packages as you file real ones.
• If the paper is quiet for a day, print a short edition. Silence is better than invention.

8. When the domain is live

1. thewisconbell.com is the paper’s name on the wire. We are a paper named Bell, not AT&T.
2. Point DNS at the hosted app (apex and www).
3. Turn on publisher login for the desk. Leave reading free.
4. Add a weather station and JobCenter links for the county.
5. Nightly backup of the database is the archive’s real insurance.