Appearance
The publisher track
You run a newsroom and you're weighing up SOM. Your systems come from several vendors, plus some you built yourself. This track helps you answer three questions on a live bus, before anything reaches production:
- How does SOM fit our newsroom? Which system owns a story, who says what, and who needs to hear it.
- Do our systems and our vendors' products work together over SOM? Not on a slide: on a bus, with your own story flows.
- Which vendors are ready, and what's missing? On evidence you can compare.
Your workspace is your house: your own sandbox on the bus, where your in-house apps and your invited vendors' apps exchange SOM messages. It holds synthetic content only.
Evaluate first, vendors later
You don't need a vendor on the bus to start. Most publishers begin with no vendors connected, and their vendors wait to see whether the publisher cares. So the track starts with what you can do alone:
| First | What you learn | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Paste one of your own stories into the SOM fit check | How your story model maps onto SOM 1.0, what's missing, and a starter message | Available now |
| Read the newsroom workflows | What SOM looks like in a newsroom: a breaking story, a standards gate, a killed story | Available now |
| Rehearse a workflow in your house, with RND stand-ins playing the systems you haven't connected | Every step of a workflow answered on your own bus, before any vendor joins | Available now |
| Set your story ownership and read your routing map | Who may write a story, and who receives what | Available now |
Then bring in your vendors one by one. Cast each vendor's connection in its role, and it takes over that part of the rehearsal from the stand-in, so the same workflows become your test of that vendor.
The seven steps
| # | Step | You end with | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Map your newsroom to SOM | A system inventory, a story-ownership model and a message flow map | Available now |
| 2 | Set up your house | Your in-house apps connected, story ownership set, and a first story on the timeline | Available now |
| 3 | Bring in your vendors | Each vendor invited, briefed and granted only what its role needs | Available now |
| 4 | Rehearse workflows end to end | Your story flows played across every system at once | Available now: by hand, and as rehearsals |
| 5 | Observe and diagnose | A way to see what happened to any story, and which system did it | Available now |
| 6 | Evaluate your vendors | A comparable scorecard per vendor, with evidence | Available now: by hand, and with the coverage matrix |
| 7 | Go live | Your house exported, and a plan for your private production bus, run by RND | Available now: the export. Next: the private bus |
Skills, from the newsroom's side
AI skills read your stories and raise warnings for editorial attention. Your house decides which skills run, with your values, and which vendor's executor runs them.
| Topic | For |
|---|---|
| Skills for publishers | What a skill is to a newsroom; skill types; hold, flag and inform in editorial terms; who acts on a warning |
| Configuring your house's skills | A story's skills_config against your house's registered configured instances; reference skills as a baseline |
| Which executors cover your skills | Reading the evidence of which vendor executor covers which skill, and finding the gaps |
| Skills in your scenarios | Adding skill cases to your end-to-end runs, the standards gate first |
Who does what
| Role | Typical person | Steps |
|---|---|---|
| Owner | Head of newsroom technology, architect | 1, 6, 7 |
| Integration lead | Solution architect, integration engineer | 1 to 6, and the skill topics |
| In-house developers | Your own tool builders | 2, 4, and the vendor pages for their apps |
| Vendor contacts | One technical contact per vendor | 3, 4 |
| Editorial and standards | A producer and a standards editor | 4 and the skill topics: they know which stories and warnings matter |
What your vendors read
Your vendors follow the vendor pages of these docs: Integrate as a vendor, then producer, consumer and skill pages, ending with the readiness checklist and a results statement they share with you. Your in-house developers follow the same pages for your own apps, and grade them in your workbench. Each step of this track says which vendor page it pairs with.