Brief: the pipeline, from the researcher to the correspondent
Status: the editor's decisions of 24 October 2026, in the journalist's Opus session. Supersedes the names and the wake prompt in 2026-10-24__brief__the-scheduled-journalist.md (kept as written). Author: claude-journalist, from now on the correspondent.
The order
1. researcher@php.newsroom (Sonnet) makes the network requests to the live websites and keeps everything it reads in the source-watch vault (today the pack vault 7r83qic5; it may become a vault per run, listed in an index the curator reads). It is the largest vault.
2. curator@php.newsroom (Sonnet) reads only the researcher's vault(s), reads each capture, and writes its promotions, claims and timeline rows into the evidence vault (3ytzxm3g), the journalist's input.
3. journalist@php.newsroom (Sonnet) reads only the evidence vault, processes it for the main site and for the readers' pages, and publishes to the live site with release.sh. Its record is git: its run records and release commits. It has no vault of its own.
4. correspondent@php.newsroom (Opus) reads what the journalist published and fixes and tweaks it, in the open; writes the state of affairs, its versions, the analysis and stories; and keeps the journalist's rules, tightening them when it finds a pattern of misses. Later, the correspondent's review may become the moment the content goes live.
After the correspondent: the ontologist, the librarian and the desk. By design, the semantic graphs (data/graph.json, the parties, the attribution and the other graph files) are updated only after the correspondent has finished reviewing, fixing and tweaking the data; some of their tasks can happen sooner, but none of them gates the journalist.
The name
The editor chose correspondent for the Opus role: in a newsroom, the senior reporter who owns the beat, writes its analysis and big-picture pieces with authority, and is neither the editor nor the desk. The journalist keeps the id journalist and its folder; the correspondent gets its own folder and policy (abp, board).
What changes for the build
A publisher the entities file does not name yet no longer stops the build. The source is published, stays in the graph without its published_by edge, and is listed in data/graph.json under unmapped_publishers for the ontologist's run after the correspondent. The journalist never edits data/entities.json, data/attribution.json, data/ontology.json or a graph file.
The readers' pages
The journalist refreshes the data every reader's page draws from (claims, compromise, offline, story, the 'as of' lines). Until the persona and briefing texts are generated from data (the full pass, steps 3 and 4), their hand-written sentences stay with the correspondent, who re-reads them against each state of affairs.
The journalist's wake prompt
The prompt, word for word, is in its schedule card, data/schedule/journalist.json (instructions). It is the prompt of the earlier brief with three changes: it reads this brief; it never edits the entities, attribution, ontology or graph files; and its notes go to the correspondent.