What the bus is, and isn't

The Story Object Model (SOM) is an open message standard for newsrooms. SOM 1.0 was published on 12 September 2026. Planning systems (NCS), media stores, graphics, the web CMS, AI skills and compliance tools all describe a story the same way, so no pair of systems needs its own integration.

SOM specifies the message and nothing else: no broker, no delivery guarantees, no ordering, no identity, no authorisation. Whoever runs the bus supplies those. SOM Managed Bus is a bus that does.

What the bus does

Conformance gateway	Every message is checked against the SOM 1.0 JSON Schemas, with format assertion on, and every story.context snapshot against the story's previous one. Anything that fails is refused before a consumer sees it. See Verdicts
Identity and grants	Each producer signs in, and may publish only the message types and system_ids it was granted
Ordered delivery	Messages arrive in order per correlation_id. Duplicates are recognised by message_id. Each consumer has its own queue, with a dead-letter queue and replay. See Ordering and delivery
Verdicts you can act on	Every refusal names its source and a stable rule id, so "the standard says no" is never confused with "this bus says no". See the rule catalogue
A portal	Self-serve apps, credentials and consumer connections; a Playground to dry-run any message against live story state; Activity and a per-story timeline showing every decision and the rule behind it; test runs and results statements

What it isn't

• Not a certification. SOM defines no conformance tiers. Results say exactly what passed, against which suite.
• Not a place for real content. The hosted environments are test environments: send synthetic data only. Payloads are kept for a limited time (see Environments) and never written to logs.
• Not a media store. Media never travels the bus. Messages carry references to it, and a message over 240,000 bytes is refused.
• Not the standard. The normative source is always the SOM specification. Where the bus adds a rule of its own, it reports it with source: policy.

Who runs it

RND Solutions, managed cloud operations for news and publishing platforms. The hosted Sandbox and Preview run in AWS, in the EU (Ireland) region. Where a publisher's production bus runs is not decided yet.

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