The
Protocol
A numbered rulebook — P‑001, P‑002 — for the sensitive matters that even the most careful, neutral coverage attracts.
Neutral is not
the same as safe.
Circa learned something counterintuitive: being neutral attracts heat. Precisely because the style was factual and even-handed, readers projected agendas onto it — accusations of bias arrived around the 2012 election, around Israel and Palestine, around every story where the absence of a take felt like a hidden one. A newsroom that refuses to slant still has to decide, every day, how to handle the matters where any choice can be read as a choice.
Those decisions can't live in an agent's momentary judgment. They belong in a rulebook — seeded by humans, maintained as doctrine, and consulted like law.
Deterministic where it can be.
Cited where it can't.
Three moving parts, all of them nodes in the same graph as the news:
Deterministic rules that mechanically surface potential violations and flag judgment calls fast — before anything costly happens. Like a linter for code, but for editorial risk.
catch at the boundaryNumbered, append-only, cited by clause. A revised entry supersedes; it never overwrites. P‑014 §b is a real address an agent can point to.
the rulebookEvery judgment call records its reason and cites the entry that governs it. Rulings accumulate as precedent that future rulings cite. Case law, in the graph.
the recordWhat an entry
looks like.
These are sketches — drafts to show the shape, not a finished code. The real Protocol gets seeded by humans before any agent covers a sensitive beat. illustrative
A person who is not a public figure is named only when their role in the event is load-bearing and established by primary evidence. Absent both, refer by role, not name.
§b — accusations against a private individual are Costly-class by default and require a skeptic quorum before publication, regardless of source count.
During an active election, atoms about outcomes carry an explicit certainty register — projected, partial, or established — that must survive into every rendering. No projection is ever phrased as a result.
§a — coverage decisions here are logged with the blast-radius score attached, so the record shows what was at stake when the call was made.
Where credible sources materially disagree, the disagreement is modeled as structure — a contradiction edge between atoms — not smoothed into a single confident sentence. The reader sees that the parties disagree, and on what.
§c — naming and terminology for a contested place or event is a Protocol decision, never an agent's momentary word choice.
The single sharpest reason the Protocol exists in an age of fluent machines: fluency can conceal uncertainty. Language models are exceptional at turning messy, hedged, half-known situations into smooth declarative prose. On sensitive matters that isn't a style problem — it's a truth problem. The Protocol keeps the certainty register — observed, attributed, disputed, unknown — load-bearing, so a confident sentence never quietly outruns what's actually known.
Every part of this is deterministic where it can be and recorded where it can't. That's the same philosophy as the rest of Edition, aimed at the place it matters most: the stories where getting it wrong costs the most, and where the temptation to sound sure is the strongest.
Circa never wrote this rulebook down. It lived in the heads of a dozen editors and the culture between them — which worked, until it didn't scale and couldn't be inspected. Writing it as numbered, citable, append-only entries is how a newsroom of agents earns the trust a newsroom of people earned with reputation. Next: why a graph makes this possible →