Pipeline phases and editorial states

Every story in ErmisAI carries two labels that look similar and mean different things. On a feed card they sit next to each other on the right-hand side; on a review row they are two adjacent table columns.

• The pipeline phase describes production: how far the article itself has got.
• The editorial state describes the decision: what your desk has said about it.

They move independently, and they routinely disagree. A card reading Ready to compose next to In review is not a bug, and this page explains why.

The two systems side by side

Both filters live in the feed's filter bar. Both are exact-match, so choosing one narrows the list to stories carrying exactly that label.

Pipeline phases

The five labels you can select in the All pipeline filter are:

Collecting and Clustering are unreachable

Fetching, grouping, and writing the synthesised source story all happen in one pass before a card ever appears in your feed. By the time you can see a story, that work is finished, so no story is ever labelled Collecting or Clustering. Both remain in the filter dropdown, and selecting either returns the empty state, "No stories match your current filters."

Ready to compose is the phase that needs you

Ready to compose means exactly what it says: there is a source story, and there is no article. It is not a transitional state and it does not resolve on its own. Every story arrives with placeholder text, and only someone opening it and running compose produces the first article. Waiting produces nothing.

A story keeps this chip while the article is being written and while it sits in Draft after being saved. The chip only changes once the article enters review.

Review covers rejected articles too

Review is shown for an article that is In review and for one that was rejected. The editorial badge next to it is what distinguishes the two.

The same phase is labelled differently on different screens

This is worth knowing before you compare screens with a colleague.

In the workspace, the phase the feed calls Ready to compose is called Article synthesis, and both Collecting and Clustering collapse into a single Source intake label. The workspace also shows a four-stage strip — Source intake, Article synthesis, Editorial review, Published — with a single Last updated time. It is a position indicator, not a history: there are no per-event timestamps behind it.

Editorial states

Four states, and they are the same four everywhere in the product.

Published is terminal, and only a person can set it

Nothing in ErmisAI publishes anything by itself. Editorial Published is written by exactly one action — a human pressing Approve on the review desk — and once written it cannot be undone. A published article cannot be edited, cannot be resubmitted, and cannot be sent back. If it is wrong after approval, that is a correction to handle in your own publishing system.

Why some stories start in Draft and others start in review

When a story first appears, ErmisAI assigns its editorial state from its own read of the source coverage:

• A story with a confidence score of 85 or above that was not flagged as sensitive starts in Draft.
• Everything else — lower confidence, or sensitive material — starts in In review, with the submission time already stamped.

That second case is deliberate but it produces the combination that confuses everyone.

Reading the two labels together

The article-status line on the left of each card helps, though it does not fully disambiguate: Needs first article in english (the language name renders lower-cased, and is your article language) means no article; Article ready means a saved article that is neither Published nor In review — so it covers both Draft and Rejected; Article in review means submitted; and Published article means approved.

What each state lets you do

Two consequences are worth spelling out.

In review locks the author out of the copy, not out of the story. Trying to change the headline or body from the story workspace while an article is in review fails. Claiming an unclaimed story still works. Edits during review belong to the reviewer, who can change the headline, body, category, owner, and priority on the review desk and press Save.

A rejected article can be revised by hand, but not regenerated. Compose is only available in Draft, or while the story is still placeholder text. So after a rejection you can edit and resubmit, but you cannot ask ErmisAI to write it again. Regenerating needs Send back to compose, and the review desk only opens articles that are In review — so a reviewer must use it while the article is with them, not after rejecting it. See Editorial review and approval for how reviewers choose between the two.

The transitions

Submitting requires a written article. In the workspace, Submit for review on placeholder text short-circuits with "Generate the article before sending it to review."; the API's own refusal for the same case is "Generate the first article draft before submitting for review."

Anyone with a newsroom role can submit; members are limited to stories they own or that nobody has claimed, and claiming an unowned story assigns it to them. The three decisions are restricted to owners and admins. There is no separate approval permission on top of review access, so anyone who can open the board can approve — including approving their own article. A newsroom with one active member sees the note "You're the only active member of this newsroom, so you review and approve your own drafts."

Priority

Every story also carries one of three priorities: Standard, High, or Urgent. On a feed card the badge only appears when the priority is not Standard.

ErmisAI sets the initial priority once, at the moment the story appears: High when the story is flagged breaking or sensitive, Standard otherwise. Nothing ever sets Urgent automatically — it is only ever a human choice.

You change it in the Editorial routing controls, which appear both in the story workspace under Editorial handoff and on the review desk. The panel note is accurate: "Owner and priority move with the article into the review queue."

Priority does one thing. It orders the editorial board — Urgent first, then High, then Standard, with the most recently updated first within each group — and it feeds the board's Urgent / High counter. There is no deadline, no escalation, and no reminder attached to it. The board's Age column, shown in minutes since submission, is likewise informational: nothing acts on it.

What these labels do not decide

• The pipeline's own "Published" is not a publication. It is a confidence reading on the source coverage, and it materialises as an ordinary editorial Draft. Only the approve action publishes.
• Neither label gates delivery. What reaches your publishing stack is an article that is both written and editorially Published, and it is subject to your plan's daily allowance. See Getting approved stories out.
• The confidence score gates nothing at all. It decides which editorial state a story starts in, and after that it is a reading for you to act on, not a control. See Confidence, sources and conflicts.
• Sensitive is not a state. It raises the initial priority to High and routes the story to In review at the start, and it is shown as a Sensitive badge on the review desk and a column and counter on the board. It adds no approver and blocks nothing. See Sensitive coverage and editorial limits.