Commissioning

How to apply this skill

1. Record the question, audience, geography, time window, known event dates, and research cutoff. Use the question's natural scope; clarify only an ambiguity that could materially change the investigation. When proceeding with an assumption, record it.
2. Identify the public consequence: who is affected, what decision or understanding the story can improve, and what remains unknown. For a front-page issue, explain selection using consequence, material developments, and available evidence. Popularity can indicate reach but cannot establish importance or truth alone.
3. Split the assignment into factual subquestions, forecasts, and value judgments. Examples: what happened; what caused it; who knew what when; what a policy changed; what evidence distinguishes the explanations. A moral preference is not a true-or-false factual claim.
4. Name plausible explanations without choosing a winner. List observations that would support or weaken each. Include the strongest competing explanation and relevant affected perspectives, not a mechanical left/right quota.
5. Choose the useful article form: investigation, reported narrative, explainer, comparison, or genuine short evidence answer. Full articles default to the illustrated narrative defined by production-quality; load it with narrative-writing and visual-journalism now, inspect its reference treatment, and start the joint story/visual beat plan and capability check. Record the opening question, likely consequential turns, visual jobs and delivery requirements before drafting the complete prose. If the reader’s scope warrants a brief or an explicit format changes the treatment, record that rationale here; limited time, tools or a thin draft do not retroactively authorize a reduced full article. Narrative length must earn itself through documented action and consequence.
6. Set discovery priorities and a stopping rule: resolve central subquestions adequately, or make their gaps explicit after pursuing the most promising original evidence and contrary leads. A daily deadline changes scope, not the verification standard.

What this produces

Return a dated brief containing originalQuestion, workingQuestion, scope, audience, publicValue, subquestions, candidateExplanations, decisiveEvidence, format, treatment, visualBeatPlan, riskFlags, and stopRule. Identify exclusions, assumptions and any genuine treatment exception. If this is an update, name the existing edition and the suspected material change, and preserve its established visual quality in the plan.

Sources behind this skill

Apply consistent selection and evidence standards informed by IFCN commitments and Reuters standards. The brief fields are Follow.fyi's operational design, not those organizations' certification requirements.