PROV-07 · Wire service imaginary

Someone sends your newsroom a photograph or video of something newsworthy and cannot tell you much about where it came from. Write the intake checklist that decides what you do next — publish, hold, verify further, or decline — when provenance is incomplete, which is the normal case.

Your program's actual contributor path, if it has one, or the one it would need. Published verification practice from newsrooms that document theirs, cited. Five realistic intake scenarios the teacher or mentor writes, each with a different combination of missing information: no metadata, an anonymous sender, a plausible but unverifiable account, a second-hand file, a file with intact but unfamiliar credentials.

A checklist that resolves to "verify it" without saying how. Treating missing metadata as disqualifying — most honest phone media arrives stripped by the platform it came through. Building a checklist only a full-time verification desk could run, which a student newsroom will abandon by week two. No decline path, so every item eventually gets published. Ignoring the contributor's safety, which is sometimes why provenance is thin.

An intake checklist: the steps in order with a rough time cost for each; the decision points with what each outcome triggers; the five scenarios run through it with the resulting decision and the reasoning; the decline path written explicitly, including what you tell the contributor; and a note on what your program would have to add to handle the hardest scenario.

CT: deciding under irreducible uncertainty. CR: designing something a small newsroom will actually run. CO: a peer runs two scenarios blind from the checklist and reaches a decision. CM: a checklist usable by an editor on deadline. CZ: the contributor, and the people in the footage.

A wire, desk, or verification editor reviews the checklist against the scenarios. Standing instruction: reject a checklist with no decline path. School-supervised.

R1: one newsroom, one contributor path. R2: another editor reaches the same decisions from the checklist. R3: comparator is current practice or its absence. R4: incomplete-provenance cases handled without treating absence as evidence. R5: runs on deadline. R6: names what will not be published regardless of news value.

(a) "Verify the source" as a checklist step. (b) A process so heavy the newsroom quietly stops using it.

Lane A immediately (journalism capstone or student publication project). No verified credit claim.