Your first story, end to end

ErmisAI brings you a source story — a cluster of related reports with a reporting brief. It does not bring you an article. The first article is written when you press a button, and it reaches the outside world only after someone approves it.

This page walks one story through the whole chain, naming the exact control at each step. Read it once yourself, then hand it to the next person who joins the desk.

Before you start

You need a finished newsroom setup — if yours is incomplete, ErmisAI sends you back to the setup wizard instead of the feed. See Set up your newsroom.

Which steps you can perform depends on your role:

Members do not see Editorial in the sidebar at all. More in Team, roles and permissions.

Step 1 — Open the feed

Signing in takes you straight to the feed. Its heading is Feed and the line under it reads "Scan source stories, see whether an article exists yet, and open the right one fast."

On a brand-new newsroom the list is empty for a short while. You will see an animation, a rotating status line such as "Warming up the newsroom…" or "Scanning the wires…", and underneath it:

Fetching, clustering, and writing the newsroom articles can take up to a minute. Please be patient - and stay hydrated.

New source coverage keeps arriving on a schedule whether or not anyone is looking, so you do not need to keep the tab open. Refresh sources forces a fresh pull immediately.

Three counters sit above the list: Stories (how many rows match your filters), Delivered (how many stories were released into the feed today), and Queued. Queued matters at the end of this walkthrough, not now.

Step 2 — Read the card

Pick any row. A card carries two independent status labels, and this is where most new users get confused.

A card that reads Ready to compose and In review is not a bug. The pipeline routed the story to review because its confidence was moderate or it was flagged sensitive; nobody has written the article yet. Both label sets are explained in Pipeline phases and editorial states, and the score in Confidence, sources and conflicts.

The confidence descriptors and the breaking pill stay in English in every interface language.

Press Open.

Step 3 — Look at the brief before you generate

The story workspace opens in Refinement mode with the Brief tab selected in the right-hand sidebar. The other tabs are Editorial, Desk, and — if your newsroom has the personal queue switched on — Queue.

The Reporting brief panel is the material the article will be built from:

• a Source story block with the synthesized story headline and chips such as 3 sources and 2 angles (this block singularizes to 1 source, unlike the feed card, which always says sources)
• the event summary
• Angles to preserve
• an amber Open issues block, when the model flagged anything contradictory in the coverage
• a collapsible Source attribution list

Its own subheading tells you how to treat it: "Use this as source context for the article, not as publication copy."

The article panel below is empty and says "No article text is saved yet. Switch to compose to generate the first article in English."

Step 4 — Generate the first article

The article is written in your newsroom's article language, whatever the sources were written in. That language is a setting, never inherited from the coverage — see Interface language and article language.

Step 5 — Tighten the article

Nothing on this screen touches the saved article until you explicitly apply it.

The chat panel is titled Article workspace. Type an instruction such as "Give me three stronger headline options in a newsroom tone." Replies are labelled ErmisAI.

A reply on its own changes nothing. Under each finished reply are three buttons — Copy, Append to article, and Replace article. The last two only appear once a saved article exists, and are disabled while a reply is still streaming. Applied text is stripped of markdown before it is saved, and you get Reply appended to the article or Article replaced with the assistant reply.

Quick completion is a separate one-line box: "One instruction, one source-grounded continuation for the saved article." Type an instruction, press Generate, read the preview, then choose Append to article, Replace article, or Discard.

Regenerating works only while the story is still in editorial state Draft. Once it moves on, the panel says "Regeneration is locked because the saved article has already entered editorial workflow."

Two limits worth knowing before you paste a lot of text in: the saved article is capped at 25,000 characters, and if a colleague saved the same story while you were working you will see "This story was updated by someone else. Refresh and try again." — ErmisAI reloads the latest version for you, and you reapply your change on top of it.

Save snapshot, in the Editorial tab, records a point in the story's revision history. It changes neither the article nor its state. Use it before a risky rewrite.

Step 6 — Send it to review

Open the Editorial tab in the sidebar. The Editorial handoff panel shows the current State and Priority, an Owner menu, a Priority menu, and Submit for review.

Press it. You get Article routed to review queue, the story appears on the editorial board, and it is cleared from every member's personal queue. Everyone who can review — the other owners and admins — is notified.

Two things can surprise you here:

• The button is already disabled. That means the story materialised as In review rather than Draft. Composing it was enough to put it on the board; there is nothing to submit.
• Append and Replace stop working. Once a story is In review, the story workspace refuses headline and body changes with "Draft cannot be updated in its current state". Content edits from that point belong to the reviewer, or the story has to be sent back. Story notes, where your newsroom has them switched on, still work.

If your newsroom is one person, you will see: "You're the only active member of this newsroom, so you review and approve your own drafts." That is informational — it changes no permission.

Step 7 — Review and decide

Owners and admins open Editorial in the sidebar. The board is headed Editorial board / "Articles waiting for editorial review." with four counters: Queued, Urgent / High, Unassigned, and Sensitive.

Rows are ordered urgent, then high, then standard priority, and within each group the most recently updated first. There is no filter, no search, no sort control, and no multi-select — the only controls are Refresh, the Open review link on each row, and — once the board holds more than twenty stories — Previous / Next paging.

The review desk gives you an editable Headline and Article body, a category menu, the Source headline and event summary for comparison, a Claim provenance list, Editorial routing (Owner and Priority), Editorial feedback, an optional Decision note, and four buttons.

Send back to compose exists because regenerating is blocked outside the Draft state. It is the only route from a submitted story back to a fresh compose run. It does not run any AI itself.

Approving your own story is allowed. There is no second sign-off, no claim or lock on a review item, and no deadline or escalation. The full decision reference is in Editorial review and approval.

Step 8 — What approval actually does

Published is terminal. The article can no longer be edited from the story workspace or the review desk, by anyone.

Approval is also the moment the story becomes deliverable:

• The feed card switches to Published article, and the pipeline pill to Published.
• The story is released into the feed and counted under Delivered.
• The story is cleared from every member's personal queue.
• Any alert rule that matches it is evaluated — approval is the only editorial decision that does this.

Your plan sets how many stories can be released per day, and the count resets at midnight UTC. Past that limit, further approved stories are held back: they disappear from the list entirely and are counted under Queued, with an amber banner reading "{n} queued for delivery (daily cap resets at midnight UTC)" and a Manage subscription link. Opening one directly shows Story unavailable with the message "Story is currently queued." The caps per plan are listed in Plan and quota reference.

To get the text out by hand, hover the saved article in the story workspace: the MD and FMT buttons copy it as markdown or as formatted text. That works on any saved article, published or not.

For everything else — the CMS and WordPress pull APIs on the higher plans, what outbound webhooks do and do not carry, and why ErmisAI never pushes into WordPress — see Getting approved stories out.

The whole chain in one table

If it does not go to plan

More messages and their causes are collected in Troubleshooting.