How it works
One morning, start to finish.
Byline reads what happened overnight, judges it against the priorities you wrote down, and sends a short brief every weekday morning. This page walks through each step: what you write, what arrives, what is set aside, what each development carries, and who stands behind it before it is sent.
01 · The Constitution
You write down what matters.
You tell Byline what matters in a short document called the Intelligence Constitution. Every brief is judged against it, and every version is dated and kept. It has six parts.
Priorities
Your priorities and the developments that could affect them.
Who it is for
The audiences whose reaction matters most.
Who to follow
The organizations, people and products to track, under every name they are known by.
Competitors
The organizations you are compared with.
Urgent signals
Words that bring an item to the top as soon as they appear.
Out of scope
Topics you have decided are not your concern.
Byline writes it with you, and you own it. Every published version is kept, dated and readable; a new version needs a named Byline reviewer’s signature before it is published; and a change is a recorded act, never a quiet edit.
02 · Overnight
What arrives, and what is set aside.
Byline reads a deliberately small set of sources, chosen because they mention the organizations and issues you follow, not because they are large or well known. Everything collected passes three gates, in order, and each brief says how many items stopped at each one.
- Named a watched entity.Did it name an organization, person or product your Constitution follows, under any of the names it is known by? Most of what arrives does not, and is set aside here.
- Touched a stated objective.Did it bear on one of the priorities you wrote down? An item can name a watched entity and touch nothing you care about.
- Cleared the evidence bar.Is every factual claim supported by a source Byline can cite and you can open? A claim with no retrievable source does not reach the brief.
When a story has more than one document, the model drafts under a stated rule: it describes the story as it now stands, so a later publication supersedes an earlier claim it contradicts, and a notice of intent never outranks the record of what was done. That rule governs the drafting, not the record: the earlier document stays in the evidence, and the item’s certainty and recommendation do not change because of it. If two sources cannot be reconciled, the item is marked disputed and waits for your own approver.
A brief never carries more than five recommendations, and recommending none is allowed.
- 200Arrived
collected through 6:00 a.m. ET - 184Set aside
did not name a watched entity - 12Set aside
named an entity but touched no stated objective - 4Held
fell below the evidence bar - 0Cleared
nothing met the bar
Illustrative screening counts: the system’s own tallies for one collection run, shown to illustrate what a quiet morning looks like from the inside. They are not public facts, and nothing outside Byline could confirm or contradict them. The same day is on the home page as a day with no new action.
03 · The brief
What each development carries.
Each development that clears the bar arrives as one item, in a fixed shape, so you always know where to look. The sample brief on the home page shows three, each with its sources open.
Byline recommends
One move, and what it asks of you: Respond (a decision is being asked of you), Prepare (likely to need you within days), Brief (recorded, no action expected) or Monitor (watched, nothing has moved). Respond and Prepare need a person today.
Why it matters
The assessment for you: what the development means for the priority it touches, and what it does not change.
The facts and their sources
Every factual claim links to a named source and when it was published. Open the source and read the excerpt it rests on.
How certain, and what is missing
Each fact is Confirmed or Unconfirmed by a fixed rule about its sources, never by the model, and what the sources do not say is marked Not known.
What would change this recommendation
The events that would move the call, named in advance, so you know what to watch for and when to look again.
Coverage note
What was read, through what time, and what was not: the limits of the observation, stated on every brief.
A day with no new action. When nothing overnight meets the bar, the brief says so, shows what was set aside and why, and carries forward what still stands. A quiet brief goes through the same evidence review as any other day.
04 · Review
Who stands behind it, before it is sent.
Every brief shows its evidence-review status. An Evidence Attestation records a completed review of the cited evidence and coverage. If a brief is delivered without that attestation, it says so clearly. Decisions requiring your approval are shown separately.
Evidence review
When a Byline reviewer completes the evidence review, the brief records the attestation: factual statements checked against their sources, and the coverage note against what was read. Without one, the brief says so.
Decision approval
Items that recommend preparing or responding, or that are disputed, need your own approver. Each approval, or its absence, is shown on its item, apart from the evidence review.
Delivery
Recorded on its own: when the brief was sent, and to whom. Delivery on its own does not mean the brief was reviewed.
No one can approve their own work: whoever wrote or last edited an item cannot give its Decision Approval, and the database refuses it, not just the app. Approvals and corrections cannot be rewritten. What Byline enforces today sets each control out.
05 · Where AI is used
AI extracts and drafts. Fixed rules rank and recommend.
Byline uses Anthropic’s Claude models for two narrow tasks: extracting claims from source text, and drafting readable prose. Prioritization, certainty labels and recommendations come from deterministic rules, not from the model. The model cannot send, publish, approve or alter records.
06 · What Byline is not
It starts where monitoring stops.
Media monitoring aims to show as much as possible and leaves the deciding to the reader. Byline shows only what matters to your priorities and says what it did not read. It does not track legislation across fifty states, manage stakeholders or grassroots campaigns, or replace a policy platform. It answers one question: of everything that happened overnight, what should your communications team do today, and what evidence supports that recommendation?
Your first brief is complimentary, on one issue you choose, and subject to scope review. Nothing recurring starts from a request.