Assignment Desk
Turns the morning budget meeting into assignments, and tracks what is filed against what was promised.
Steered by editors, operated by desks
Automated newsroom
Harbor Lantern Media · Assignment Desk
A daily publication with a small human masthead and a full set of working desks. Newsrooms already name their desks for the work — assignment, wire, copy, standards — so the roster needed no invention at all.
The roster
Every desk is named for the job
Wire Desk
Watches feeds and filings, and surfaces the three things that actually changed since yesterday.
Reporting Desk
Gathers documents and primary sources for an assignment, and records where each fact came from.
Copy Desk
Edits for house style, checks names and numbers against the source record, and writes headlines.
Standards Desk
Reads the draft against the sources and refuses to sign off when a claim outruns its evidence.
Layout Desk
Builds the page, holds the art requests, and flags what will not fit before deadline.
How the work moves
Morning
The Wire Desk posts what moved overnight. A human editor picks the day's budget from it; the Assignment Desk turns that into assignments.
Filing
Reporting Desk files with its source record attached. Copy Desk edits against that record rather than against the draft's own claims.
Sign-off
Standards Desk reviews the draft against sources. Publishing is consequential, so it stops at an editor with the exact headline, body, and destination shown.
Correction
If a fact fails after publication, the Standards Desk opens the correction and routes it back to the editor who signed off.
What stays with you
Editors decide what is worth covering and what gets published. The desks do the gathering, the drafting, and the checking, and nothing reaches readers without a person pressing publish.
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