Editorial review and approval

Editorial review is where a written article becomes a published one. A reporter submits a draft, it appears on the Editorial board, and someone with the Owner or Admin role reads it and makes one of four decisions: Save, Approve, Reject, or Send back to compose.

Approving is the only way a story ever reaches the Published state. Nothing in ErmisAI publishes on its own, at any confidence score, for any topic.

Who can review

The Editorial item in the left sidebar is visible to Owners and Admins only. Members do not see it, and if they reach the address directly they get a card reading "Editorial board access is restricted" with the line "Editorial review is limited to the editor-in-chief and managing editor." and a "Return to feed" link.

That sentence names job titles, but titles are not what the product checks. Titles in ErmisAI are free text and grant nothing. The gate is the workspace role — Owner or Admin — set on the Team screen. See Team, roles and permissions.

Two consequences worth stating plainly:

• There is no separate approval permission. Anyone who can open the board can approve, reject and send back. You cannot give someone read-only review access.
• Self-approval is allowed. The person who wrote the article can approve it, if they hold Owner or Admin. In a newsroom with one active member the story workspace says so: "You're the only active member of this newsroom, so you review and approve your own drafts."

How a story reaches the board

The author submits it. In the story workspace, the Editorial tab in the right-hand column holds the Editorial handoff panel with State, an unlabelled Owner and Priority pair of selects, and a "Submit for review" button. (The "Editorial routing" heading appears only on the Editorial review screen, not here.)

Before that button will work, the article has to exist. A story that still has its placeholder text is refused with "Generate the first article draft before submitting for review." Composing the first article is covered in Composing and refining a story.

The Owner and Priority set here travel with the article into the queue. (The Editorial review screen's Editorial routing panel spells this out — "Owner and priority move with the article into the review queue." — but that caption renders only there, not in the workspace handoff panel.) Owner assignment is limited to Owners and Admins; a Member sees the note "Owner assignment is available to editorial assignment roles." and a disabled Owner list.

Members can submit only articles they own or that have no owner yet. Submitting an unowned article makes the submitter its owner.

The board

Heading "Editorial board", subheading "Articles waiting for editorial review." Empty state: "No submitted stories are currently waiting for review."

Four counters run across the top, calculated from what is currently loaded:

Next to the "Refresh" button is a small status badge reading Live, Polling, Connecting or Offline. When it reads Live the board updates itself the moment anyone submits or decides a story; the other states mean it is falling back to periodic checks or has lost the connection, and "Refresh" always works.

The table columns are Story, Category, Owner, Priority, Confidence, Pipeline, Editorial, Sensitive, Age, Action. Owner shows "Unassigned" where none is set, Sensitive shows "Yes" or "No", Age is the number of minutes since submission at the moment the board loaded, and the row link is "Open review".

Two rough edges to expect:

• Pipeline and Editorial print the internal values (review, in_review) rather than the labels used everywhere else, and they are not translated.
• Confidence is shown here as a percentage; the feed card and story header show the same number as n/100. It is one score, not two. See Confidence, sources and conflicts.

Ordering is fixed and cannot be changed: Urgent first, then High, then Standard, and within each priority the most recently updated article first. Rows page 20 at a time with Previous and Next.

There are no filters, no sort controls, no search box, no checkboxes and no bulk approve. There is also no way to claim a story, no reviewer lock, no deadline timer and no escalation. The Age column tells you how long something has waited; nothing acts on it.

The Editorial review screen

"Open review" takes you to a single article. The header carries the screen title "Editorial review" and the line "Review, edit, and decide on the submitted article.", a "Back to board" link, a category selector, and badges for the confidence score, the pipeline phase, the editorial state, and — if the story is flagged — a red Sensitive badge. (These docs sometimes call this screen the review desk for short; there is no surface with that literal name — you reach it with "Open review" from the Editorial board.)

Below that: "Source headline" with the original wire headline and its event summary, then the two fields you can edit, Headline and Article body. The body is capped at 25,000 characters.

Then Claim provenance, which needs reading carefully. It lists the first eight paragraphs of the article and badges each one Supported, Partial support or Disputed. Those words mean less than they look like:

• Supported — the story has two or more named sources.
• Partial support — the story has exactly one.
• Disputed — the story carries at least one conflict note, which is then shown against every paragraph, with the same text each time.

Nothing here checks a sentence against a source. The evidence lines under each paragraph are assigned by position, not by meaning. Treat the panel as a prompt to go and check, never as a check that has been done. Empty state: "No claim-level provenance available." The full mechanics are in Confidence, sources and conflicts.

The right-hand column holds Editorial routing (Owner, Priority), Editorial feedback with the notes left by previous decisions (empty: "No editorial notes on this article yet."), a Story notes panel, and the decision block.

What is not on the review desk: the source list, the revision history, and the reporting brief. Those live in the story workspace.

The four decisions

Above the buttons is a Decision note field, placeholder "Optional note for the editorial team", capped at 500 characters. Whatever you type is attached to the article as a note tagged Feedback, Approved or Rejected, visible to the author in the story workspace.

Send back to compose runs no AI itself. It only returns the article to draft, which is what unlocks the compose action in the story workspace so a new article can be generated. It is the only route from review back into composition, and it leaves the confidence score untouched.

All four buttons are disabled while any save or decision is in flight.

What each decision changes for the author

Published is final. There is no reopen, no unpublish and no correction workflow inside ErmisAI. If a published article is wrong, the fix happens wherever you distributed it. Decide before you press Approve, not after.

The editorial states and the moves between them

Four states: Draft, In review, Rejected, Published.

Any other move is refused. A published article cannot be resubmitted, rejected or sent back.

Who gets told what

Review notifications land in the in-app notifications inbox. Nobody is ever notified of their own action.

None of these is emailed; they appear in the in-app inbox only — see Alert rules and notifications. The notification text is written in English in every interface language.

When two people open the same story

Nothing stops it. There is no claim, no lock and no "someone else is reviewing this" indicator.

What protects you is a version check on save. If a colleague saved while you were reading, your save is refused with "Someone else updated this draft. The latest version was loaded - review and retry." Their version is loaded into the screen; your unsaved edits are gone and nothing is retried automatically. Read the reloaded article and make your changes again.

If someone else already approved, rejected or sent the story back, your decision fails outright — the article is no longer in review, so it is no longer a review item — and you see a generic failure message. Refresh the board; the story will have left it. Only one of two simultaneous approvals takes effect, and only that one notifies anyone.

Approving is not delivering

Approve sets the story to Published inside ErmisAI. Getting it into your own publishing stack is a separate step with its own daily limit, and an approved story can sit waiting for the next day's allowance. See Getting approved stories out.

Approve is also the only one of the four decisions that runs your alert rules against the story. Reject and Send back to compose never do.

What editorial review does not do

• No filtering, sorting or searching on the board.
• No bulk approve or reject.
• No claiming, no reviewer lock, no deadline, no escalation.
• No second approver and no sign-off chain — including for stories flagged Sensitive, which changes the priority to High and adds a badge, nothing more. See Sensitive coverage and editorial limits.
• No editing after publication.
• No record of what changed. The audit trail in the story workspace notes that a review happened and what was decided; it does not store a diff.