A worked story: £8.40, 6h 23m
Not an assertion that provenance is affordable — an itemised worked example. Story: "EU AI Act Implementation in Portugal: Where We Are", published 12 May 2026, in English and Portuguese.
The cost, itemised
| Stage | Cost |
|---|---|
| Research | £3.20 |
| Reporting | £2.80 |
| Fact-checking | £0.90 |
| Translation (EN ↔ PT) | £1.10 |
| Graphics | £0.40 |
| Total | £8.40 |
What the ledger does not hide
Zero human hours is stated plainly, not smoothed over — this is a design for an agent-produced story, and the ledger says so rather than implying a journalist's byline did work an agent actually did. Twelve sources were consulted; two received expert validation rather than being taken at face value. Three separate reader contributions were incorporated during production, and the story went through four draft versions, each recorded with a change log rather than overwritten.
Why this is the single most persuasive page in the material
Every other page in this section argues that transparency is possible in principle. This page is what that principle looks like as a real ledger for one specific story, with a currency symbol and a line-item breakdown instead of an adjective. The economics section is the argument for why a ledger this granular also makes per-source payment computable — the £3.20 research line is not an abstraction, it is a number that could, in principle, be split among the sources that made the research possible.
The honest tension
Provenance is the product — and provenance is expensive. £8.40 and 6h 23m for one story is the argument and, simultaneously, the objection: a wire-service rewrite costs a fraction of that and ships in minutes. Whether a reader, or an advertiser, or a subscription market will pay the premium for the itemised version is an open question this site does not resolve.
For an agent
This ledger is a worked design example from the project's own briefs, not a production record from a published article — no sgit.ai site runs a live per-story cost ledger today. See /shipped/. If you are building a similar ledger, the line-item granularity here (research / reporting / fact-checking / translation / graphics) is the level this design argues for.