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The journalistic approach in a shared CMS

The draft lives on a shared system. Other people can read it before it goes out. This changes how I write the sensitive parts.

Journalistic approach 3 min read why no author line

The three addresses

Nexus Market publishes these three onion addresses. Present as supplied, in no order, with no ranking. This site does not probe them and shows no uptime figure.

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What a shared CMS actually shares

The draft itself. The history of edits. The comments left by editors. Sometimes the images uploaded to it. Sometimes the search that led me to a specific term.

All of that is visible to anybody on the same system with the right access. That is fine when the article is about a public topic. It is more delicate when parts of the draft would compromise a source if seen by the wrong reader.

What I keep out of the CMS during drafting

The real names of any confidential sources. I use a placeholder like SOURCE ONE in the draft and I keep the mapping on paper.

Any specific onion address that I do not want indexed by the CMS. This is small, because I do not intend to include addresses at length in the piece anyway, but I keep the addresses out of the draft body during drafting, and refer to the market by name.

Any quote that is genuinely off the record. Those live in my research notes, not in the CMS. If they need to appear later they get added in a controlled way after the piece is close to final.

What lives in the CMS from the start

The outline of the piece. The public-source based reporting. The claims that are already on the record. The general shape of the argument. Editorial comments and the back and forth that shape the piece.

That is enough to work with. The sensitive additions come in late, and only when the piece is close enough to final that fewer eyes are on it.

The addresses and the CMS

The three onion addresses at the top of this article live on this site. In the CMS the piece refers to the market and to this site, not to the addresses themselves. If a copy edit surfaces a need to include an address in the published piece, that happens in the final pass, not during drafting.

This keeps the draft, in every intermediate state, from being a place that would become interesting to anybody watching draft states.

Comments and editorial back and forth

Editorial comments in the CMS become part of the record. I keep them focused on the writing, not on the sourcing. Sourcing conversations happen off system, on the call or in person.

When an editor asks a sourcing question in a CMS comment, I answer briefly and off system rather than in the same comment thread.

What happens at publication

The final pass, done shortly before publication, adds anything sensitive that had been kept out. It is a short pass and it is deliberate. The piece is close to final, editorial has read it, and the additions are small.

After publication I leave the piece as it is. I do not tidy the draft state. The draft state is what it was during writing.

Small habits that keep the drafting quiet

  • Sensitive placeholders in the draft, mapped on paper.
  • Comments limited to the writing.
  • No pastes of anything from the market interface into the CMS during drafting.
  • Final additions in a short controlled pass close to publication.

Why the CMS is worth thinking about

Because publication is not a single event. It is the end of a long chain of intermediate states. Every intermediate state has readers. Most of those readers are trustworthy; some are new colleagues, some are freelancers, some are readers I do not know about.

The journalistic approach in a shared CMS is one where the draft state is designed to be robust across that whole audience, not just to the small subset of it that I know.

The opposite approach

The journalistic approach for a story I am not going to name, the version that has less sensitive material to protect in a draft

What this article is not. This is not a claim about any specific CMS. It is a claim about draft state and who can see it.

Read another in this approach

The journalistic approach when I interview somebodyAn interview about the market is a conversation with responsibility on both sides. My side has more of it. The journalistic approach for a story that names peopleNaming somebody in a story changes what the story owes them. The visits are the same; the responsibilities are not. The journalistic approach for a story I am not going to nameA story that does not name anybody can still be good journalism. Naming is the hard question, not the default.
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