Choosing and adding sources

Your source list decides what reaches the desk. Everything after it — which reports get grouped into a story, how confident ErmisAI is in that story, which alerts can fire — is built from the outlets you pick here.

There are two source screens and they do different jobs:

Saving in Settings pushes newly selected sources into the monitored list automatically. It never removes them. That asymmetry causes most of the surprises in this area, and it is covered in full under Sources and alerts.

Who can change sources

Changing sources requires the Owner or Admin role. Members do not see the Newsroom tab in Settings at all, and the Monitoring screen shows them "Monitoring access is restricted" with the line "Monitoring is limited to the editor-in-chief and managing editor."

The one exception is onboarding: while your newsroom setup is still incomplete, anyone completing the wizard can set sources. See Set up your newsroom.

Picking sources during onboarding

The last step of the setup wizard is Sources, headed "Who do you trust on this beat?" Below three, the counter reads "2 selected · minimum 3"; at three or more it flips to "12 selected - ready for press". The step will not complete until you have three — until then the hint reads "Select at least 3 trusted sources to go to press", and it disappears once the step is done.

You cannot add your own feed during onboarding — the step offers the catalog and the country presets only. Custom feeds are added afterwards from Settings.

What the catalog contains

The catalog holds 1,427 entries; 1,293 of them are currently active and offered in the picker. They span 57 regions and 25 languages, with English the largest by a wide margin.

Each source card shows a favicon, the outlet name, a line with its categories and region, and the raw feed URL. On the right sits an origin pill:

• Catalog — a core entry maintained by ErmisAI.
• Curated — an entry added from a curated import.
• Custom — a feed your own newsroom added.

Catalog and Curated are provenance labels only. Neither changes how the source is treated.

Selected cards also carry a Selected pill, and the right-hand pane, headed Selected sources, lists everything you have picked with a Remove button per row and a selected/cap counter. With nothing chosen it reads "No sources selected yet."; with filters that match nothing the list reads "No sources match your current filters."

The four tiers

Every catalog entry carries a tier. In Monitoring → Sources the tiers are explained on four cards:

Read "intake priority" as editorial weight, not speed. Tier does not change how often a source is checked, in what order, or whether it is checked at all. What it does change:

• the order of the source reports behind a story, so higher-tier reporting is what ErmisAI draws on first when it writes the synthesis;
• one of the four inputs to a story's confidence score.

A story corroborated only by Tier 3 outlets scores lower than the same story corroborated by Tier 1 outlets. See Confidence, sources and conflicts.

Among active catalog entries there are 20 Wire, 233 Tier 1, 371 Tier 2, and 669 Tier 3.

Adding sources by country

The Local news by country panel above the picker is a grid of country tiles, each with a flag, the country name in your interface language, and a count such as "27 sources". Search with "Search country..."; an unmatched search reads "No country matches your search."

One behaviour to plan around:

To genuinely drop a country's sources: press Clear all to deselect every country, then remove the individual outlets you do not want, then save.

Countries with no catalog sources are not offered, and the global-region outlets are never part of a country tile.

Filtering by vertical

Above the picker there is a search box ("Search sources...") and a vertical dropdown whose first option is All verticals. Selecting a vertical pill in the Primary vertical card also sets this filter.

The button beside it, Add visible vertical sources, is a bulk-add. Two caveats:

• It ignores your search box. It adds every source in the currently selected vertical — or your primary vertical if the dropdown is on All verticals — not just the ones on screen.
• If that pushes you over your plan's source cap, it silently keeps only as many as fit. No warning is shown. Check the counter afterwards.

Adding your own feed

Custom sources are added from Settings → Newsroom, not from Monitoring. The Add custom source card has a button labelled New custom source which opens a dialogue described as "Enter a website or feed URL. The system validates the URL and checks common feed endpoints before saving."

Rules worth knowing before you start:

• RSS and Atom only. ErmisAI only accepts an endpoint whose response parses as RSS or Atom. Sitemaps, JSON feeds, and scraping a page that has no feed are not supported. The one field that takes the address is Feed or website URL (named in Step 1).
• No duplicates, across both pools. If the resolved feed address already belongs to one of your custom sources or to any catalog entry, the save is refused with "This feed is already configured".
• It counts against your source cap. Custom feeds and catalog selections share one budget.
• It is monitored automatically, with breaking-story alerts on.
• Private and internal addresses are refused. A feed must be reachable on the public internet.
• Validation is rate-limited. Adding a long list of feeds in one burst will start failing; pace it.

Deleting a custom source with Delete removes it from your selection and from your monitored sources — the only removal in the product that does both.

Source caps by plan

The cap covers catalog selections and custom feeds together. It is shown in two places on the Newsroom tab: the line under Source selection, which reads "Selected sources: 12/20 · Custom sources: 1", and the Sources row of the Workspace capacity panel on the right.

Clicking an unselected source when you are already at the cap refuses the click and shows "You reached the 20 source limit for your tier."

If a paid subscription lapses into past due or cancelled, the source cap reverts to the Free figure of 20 until it is settled. Your stored selection is not deleted, but the next save will be clamped to 20. See Billing and AI capacity.

What happens when you save

There is one Save settings button and it submits the whole Newsroom form. Success shows "Newsroom settings saved".

ErmisAI re-checks your selection on save and can trim it. When it does, a warning appears beginning "Your plan only accepted part of the update:" followed by counts of what was dropped. Two things get dropped this way: sources that are no longer in your catalog, and anything past the cap. Sources you selected explicitly are kept in preference to sources a country preset pulled in.

Which of your sources actually get fetched

The catalog ships with 13 entries enabled for fetching:

Al Jazeera · All, BBC Business, BBC World, CNBC · International, Deutsche Welle · English, Financial Times · International, NPR · World, Silicon Republic, The Guardian · Business, The Guardian · World, The New York Times · Business, The New York Times · Technology, and The New York Times · World.

Custom feeds you add yourself are always fetched — they are not subject to that switch. So the practical way to cover a beat that the enabled set does not reach is to add the outlet as a custom feed, or to ask ErmisAI whether the catalog entry you want can be enabled: ermisai.com/contact.

If your feed is empty or thin, this is the first thing to check. Troubleshooting covers the other causes.

Checking source health

Monitoring → Sources is where you see whether a feed is working. The right-hand panel, Monitored sources, shows one row per monitored outlet with its feed URL, its tier, region and categories, and a health line from the most recent refresh:

There is no health line at all until your newsroom has completed at least one refresh. After that, a monitored source that still shows no health line is not being fetched — see the section above.

Health is read from the last completed refresh rather than measured when you open the screen, so it describes the most recent pull, not the current moment.

Adding a source to monitoring

The left panel of Monitoring → Sources is headed Source catalog with the instruction "Click a source to inspect it, then add it to monitored intake." Search on "Search source, region, or category", narrow with the tier dropdown (All tiers), select a row, then press the button — it reads Monitor followed by the source name, or Select a source while nothing is picked. You get "Monitored source added".

You can only monitor sources that are already in your newsroom's catalog. Anything else is refused with "Source is not part of catalog". To monitor an outlet that is not in the catalog, add it as a custom feed in Settings first.

Each monitored row shows its alert flags as "Breaking: On · All alerts: Off". Those are the values every source gets when it is added, and there is no control anywhere in the product to change them.

Sources and alerts

This is the trap that costs people alerts:

• With no monitored sources, alert rules consider every published story in your feed.
• With one or more monitored sources, rules only consider breaking stories from those sources — because every monitored source is created with breaking-only alerting.

Since saving Settings automatically monitors whatever you selected, a newsroom that has never opened the Monitoring screen still has monitored sources and is therefore already narrowed to breaking stories.

And the removal asymmetry, stated plainly: deselecting a source in Settings does not remove it from monitoring. Your feed stops pulling from it, but its monitoring entry stays until you press Remove on the Monitoring screen, which confirms with "Monitored source removed". The one exception is deleting a custom source, which removes both.

Full detail in Alert rules and notifications.

What your source list changes downstream

• Coverage. Only articles from your selected, fetched sources are clustered into stories for your desk.
• Confidence. How many distinct sources corroborate a story, and what tier they are, are two of the four factors behind the signal score on every card.
• Alert eligibility. Rules can require a minimum number of sources per story, and can be restricted to a specific list of sources.
• Nothing else. Sources do not affect your daily delivery allowance, your AI capacity, or which plan features you have.

Newsrooms sharing an organisation share one source list; a solo workspace has its own. Changing sources in one has no effect on the other.