Broadcast newsrooms run on cognitive load. Every script that comes in needs an intro, a tease, a VOSOT, a web story, a headline. The formats are rigid. The rules don't change. The deadline doesn't move. And by the time you're writing your sixth tease of the night, your brain is done — but the show isn't.

Most consultants will tell you intros and teases are the two most important things in a newscast. They're also the two things most likely to be written last, under the most pressure, by someone who has been staring at the same scripts for eight hours. Producers write six or seven teases per show. At shops where a package runs at six and again at ten, the ten o'clock producer needs a fresh treatment with no cognitive load to spare.

Reporters face a parallel version of the same problem. A reporter's day ends with a package — then comes the VOSOT, then the web story. At shops where reporters turn multiple stories a day, that reformatting work stacks fast. The format is mechanical. The rules are consistent. That's exactly the kind of work that should be automated.

Paste a script. Select a format. Get production-ready copy.

• Intro — Two-sentence anchor lead. Compelling fact first, reporter toss second. No bill numbers, no names except the reporter.
• VOSOT — Full ON CAM / TAKE VO / TAKE SOT / VO conversion. Selects the strongest SOT, preserves it verbatim, and doesn't parrot it in the lead-in.
• Tease — Two sentences. Hook and promise. Rotated language so "coming up" doesn't run six times an hour.
• Headline — AP style, hard 43-character limit, active voice. Character count included so producers aren't guessing.
• Summary — Three-sentence breakdown: news, context, impact. Built for "News in 90" segments and top-of-show rundowns.
• Feedback — Sentence-by-sentence editorial critique. Active/passive voice flags, AP style issues, clarity notes.
• Web Story — Full broadcast-to-digital conversion. Strips formatting tags, restores phonetic spellings, converts SOTs to attributed quotes.

The estimate is roughly ten to twenty minutes saved per VOSOT. Multiply that across a full reporting staff, five days a week, and you're giving people real time back — time that goes toward the next story, not reformatting the last one.

The feedback tool addresses something more specific: every reporter should run their script through some form of AI before it hits their EP. The feedback generator does a first-pass edit — active versus passive voice, AP style flags, sentence structure, clarity. It catches the five typos in the first two sentences before the EP ever sees them.

The prompts inside Copy Desk encode more than a decade of broadcast writing — the rules, the structure, the instincts that come from years of training and feedback. A producer using the tease generator isn't outsourcing the work. They're getting a solid draft to react to instead of staring at a blank field on deadline.

Headlines are a good example of the real problem. Lower thirds have to fit in roughly 43 characters. Some stories write themselves. Others don't — how do you compress a complicated budget bill into one line? Copy Desk spits out several options. Sometimes you use one as-is. Sometimes you combine two. Either way, you're not grinding through that mental math from scratch thirty times a newscast.

Every format. Every output. Every time — the person using this tool is responsible for what goes on air. Copy Desk speeds up the process. It does not replace the judgment of the producer, the reporter, or the EP. Accuracy, fairness, and editorial standards are still a human job. That's not a disclaimer. That's the point.

Flask backend on the same DigitalOcean droplet as Story Desk. A single /api/copydesk endpoint accepts the script and format type, streams the Claude response back to the browser as server-sent events. Output starts appearing within a second or two of hitting Generate.

The system prompt isn't a suggestion. It encodes the actual rules of broadcast copy writing — format structure, SOT handling, AP style constraints, character limits. The model follows them or the output is wrong. API key lives server-side. Anyone with the link just uses it.