Replicate this newsroom

Everything that makes this newsroom run is published. Here is what you can take, and how far each piece is ready to be taken.

The point of publishing how this newsroom runs is that someone else can run one. This page says what you can copy today, where it is, and how far each piece is packaged. It also says what is not packaged yet, because a replication guide that hides its gaps sends people into them.

What you can copy today

The piece	What it does	Where	Packaged?
The reading meter	Charges a few pence a page from a balance in the reader’s browser, by how far they read. Never blocks a page. Builds the reader’s personas and their own newsroom.	SG Meter and its security model	Yes. A versioned web component: copy five files, add a config, load one module.
The roles and their rules	6 roles, each with a written behaviour policy saying what it owns, what it may do and what it refuses.	The roles, the policies	As text. Every role page has a markdown twin to copy and adapt.
How to publish	Publishing is adding one file, with no approval step. Placement on the front page is the one thing a single role owns.	How to publish, the board, the run log	As a written procedure.
Subscribe without a server	The reader’s address is encrypted in their browser and sent to a lane that can only be written to.	Subscribe and its public description in .well-known/sgit-subscribe.json	As a pattern and a script. The vault it writes to is one you create.
The evidence method	Fetch a source once, freeze the bytes, hash them, derive every figure by a published rule, and refuse to ship when any of it stops re-deriving.	The method, the published vault	Yes. The World News Day vault carries its data, its build code and its gate. Clone it with the published read key and run `python3 build/gates.py`.
Testing it on readers who do not exist	Five invented readers drive a real browser through a site one screenshot at a time, are interviewed and rate it, and every finding names its page and step. Not user research: a structured reading of the site from five points of view.	How to run synthetic users, and the study of this site	Yes. The study is a vault, open with a published read key, and carries the protocol, the personas, the driver (a 58-line Playwright helper) and the data, so the next run can be compared with it.
The site itself	Static HTML, one definition of the navigation, and a gate that refuses a broken link, a wrong canonical address or anything shaped like a secret key.	How this site is built, the repository	Yes. Code under Apache 2.0, content under CC BY 4.0.

Newsrooms already built this way

Instance	What it is	See it
The SGit Newsroom	67 articles since 17 August 2026, a newsletter, collections and desk notes, by one person and a desk of agents.	The front page
pt.newsroom.sgit.ai	A Portuguese-language newsroom, started from this site’s method and the evidence it had gathered on the Portuguese startup ecosystem.	pt.newsroom.sgit.ai
World News Day 2026	Twenty-one commissioned op-eds, fetched, frozen, hashed, described and graphed, published as an encrypted vault that opens as an app.	The corpus

What is not packaged yet

The article generator. The newsroom’s pages are built on sgit.ai, by a generator that also builds the rest of sgit.ai, and imported here at the same addresses (sgit.ai v0.7.40, commit 6c29e29). When this site becomes the publisher the generator moves here, and it is extracted as it moves. Until then there is no template you can fork and fill with your own articles.

Payments. A top-up here is a £5 payment on Stripe’s page. The page it returns to adds the credit in the reader’s browser and cannot check the payment, which the meter says plainly. The money goes to the Stripe account behind the link, and nothing reaches the people whose facts an article uses. If you copy the meter, the link, the account and the returning page are yours to set up.

Other things built to be copied

Seed companies: seven business templates, under a Creative Commons licence, published so that someone else can build them.

For an agent

The Packaged? column is the claim to rely on. Only SG Meter and the World News Day vault are self-contained enough to reuse without reading the source. There is no forkable newsroom template yet; do not tell a user there is.