The five titles of horsantenne.be are written, checked, illustrated, published, rewritten in two languages and distributed by a chain of programs, every thirty minutes, with no human reading anything before it goes live. This page says who does what in that chain, with which model, and where each one stops.
A real, sourced fact is law: nothing in a dispatch may say more than the sources said. Everything invented (the reaction of the columnists, who are characters) must stay within that fact, and two desks in the chain exist only to say no.
Each desk is a separate program with a narrow mandate; none can do the next one’s job. The same code runs the five titles, each with its newsroom, its line, its sources and its lexicon.
Who does what
The chain, desk by desk
One pass every thirty minutes, in this order. Each desk is a program; under its name, the pipeline module that holds it.
The clippings reader
Every thirty minutes, day and night, he reads the feeds
ingestEach title has its list of sources: RSS feeds, Google News, a few site listings. The clippings reader takes their headlines, summaries and links, never more. He introduces himself under a name that says who he is (GrandChelemBot, HorsJeuBot…), respects each outlet's robots.txt, never asks again for what he has already read, and waits between two requests to the same host.
The sorter
One event, one pile
dedupeHe groups what is about the same event, over seventy-two hours, by the resemblance of the headlines. When two piles in different languages seem to tell the same story, a fast model decides, same event or not; that is the only question it is ever asked.
The copy editor
The laugh test, and the quotas
scoreHe scores each pile from 0 to 10 on what can be made of it, according to the comic mechanics of the title, and names the main subject. He raises his flags. Doping, health, bereavement, private life: red, the pile is closed. Delicate subject: orange, carry on with care. Below 7, the pile goes to recycling. He keeps the day's count: six to ten dispatches depending on the scores, no more than two subjects about the same person within twenty-four hours. It is the only desk in the chain that sees every subject.
The researcher
The factual core, the only truth admitted
factsFor what gets through the sort, he opens the articles where the site allows it, sticks to the summary elsewhere, and writes the core: who, what, which result, which exact quotes, which main source. The main source is an article he has read in full. A first name or surname that no source gives is kept only if Wikidata knows a person with exactly that name; otherwise the person stays named as in the article. Without a readable article, the subject waits for another outlet to pick it up. Nothing downstream may say more than that core. Two sources that contradict each other, and the subject waits for a third to settle it.
The columnists
One draft per columnist, each in its own voice
generateThe core goes to each of the title's four columnists. Each hands in a draft in their own voice: headline, standfirst, body, and their reaction, the only invented thing in the whole affair. They have the title's bible, their character sheet, the core and the latest headlines in front of them; they have no access to the web and can add nothing to the core.
The editor-in-chief
The same model, put to the test
judgeThis desk is held by the same model as the columnists. We feared it would go easy on drafts that resemble its own: compared on the same texts with a stronger model, it was the harsher grader, especially on faithfulness to the core. It scores each draft from 0 to 5 on five criteria: funniness, faithfulness to the core, accuracy of the voice, good nature, and the retweet test. Could the person quoted share it with a laugh? One criterion below 3 and the draft falls. The rotation of the by-lines happens here: among the drafts left, the one from a columnist who has not signed the latest dispatches goes first, without any subject ever falling for that reason alone. It keeps the best, or none: the least bad is never published. Its scores and its comment on each discarded angle are published with it.
The checker
Two passes, and a red pencil with no appeal
guardrailsThe first pass does not think: the title's forbidden lexicon, length for the format, structure, a headline tic already seen in the latest headlines, a standfirst fully contained in the core, clean HTML. The second reads: every claim checked against the core (a well-known fact, a public figure's nationality or record, passes), flags, balance between the sides, a jab at the looks, health or private life of a real person, a headline still true. A repairable fault (an orphan claim, a length) triggers a repair, remove or replace and nothing else, then a full re-read; two repairs at most. A false headline, a jab, a red flag: the bin, no appeal. All the drafts pass through it in the same batch, the chosen one and the discarded ones; if the chosen one falls, one of the others takes its place, by the editor-in-chief's rule: first the one from a columnist who has not signed the latest dispatches, and among those, the best scored. If they have all fallen, the dispatch does not come out.
The art director and the illustrator
One illustration per dispatch, never a portrait
illustrateThe first writes the scene that tells the punchline, a single text to be drawn, a colour accent, and the image description in three languages. The second draws it flat, in the title's colours. Real people appear as drawn figures, never portraits, and nothing is about anyone's body; on an orange subject, the scene stays on the sport and the objects. A refusal from the image model means a new brief, more neutral, three at most. Until the image is there, the dispatch waits. A last program cuts the illustration into cards for previews and social networks, with the title's monogram and the columnist's name.
The publisher
Going live, with no button
publishIt places the dispatch in WordPress with its source linked at the bottom, the transparency note and its section, and publishes it. Its account can only create, publish and schedule its own articles: it can neither delete nor touch the rest of the site. Never two dispatches at the same time: the second of a pass is scheduled twenty minutes after the first. Every person named in the core gets a page where their dispatches gather. The discarded angles that passed the checker are placed next to the dispatch, in French only, out of the search engines, with the editor-in-chief's scores; if the editor pulls the dispatch, they go with it. At each pass, it also brings the readers' votes back into the database, text by text.
The transcreators
Rewritten in Dutch and English, not translated
translateWithin the same pass, the dispatch is rewritten in the two other languages: the joke is remade in the language, the core stays the same. Each version goes back past the checker, keeps the same illustration, and the three are linked together.
The bill-poster
One dispatch, one post
facebookWhen the title has a Facebook page, every published dispatch is posted there with its link: one per pass, the oldest first, within twenty-four hours of publication, in French. The post's text is written by the columnists along with the dispatch; the bill-poster only puts it up.
The ball boy
At 7 am, yesterday's mail
newsletterOn each title, the youngest in the newsroom, a character too, walks through yesterday and picks up what is actually online, the editor's withdrawals included. He hands over three, the best rated by the editor-in-chief, a different columnist each, writes the subject line and a few lines, and posts the mail at 7 am to whoever left an address. He writes no dispatch himself.
The watchman
The report, after the fact
notifyAt the end of each pass, it sends the editor what happened: what went out, dispatches and discarded angles, what is scheduled, what was rejected and by whom, what is waiting for an image or a batch. The report written at the same time adds the readers' votes: how many texts were rated, the average, the laughs, and the dispatch compared with its discarded angles. That is where a human reads the dispatch for the first time, already online.
The portal
Every ten minutes, horsantenne.be reads the titles
gc-hubThis site has neither chain nor newsroom. It reads each title's public API and keeps one mirror per dispatch and per language: the headline, the standfirst, the illustration (the title's own, never copied), the columnist, the date. It republishes nothing: every card takes you to the dispatch on the title that wrote it. A dispatch pulled from its title disappears from here at the next pass. The discarded angles stay on their title, it does not pick them up.
What the human does
One editor, one person. They write each title’s bible (the line, the rules, the formats), the columnists’ character sheets, the list of sources, the forbidden lexicon, the thresholds and the quotas; they choose the models. They read the reports, and they have the hand in WordPress to pull a dispatch (the discarded angles placed next to it go with it), reclassify it or put it back in draft, always after the fact. They neither write nor rewrite dispatches, and read none before it is online. When something is off, they do not fix the dispatch: they fix the rule, and the chain runs again.
What the readers do
Under every dispatch and every discarded angle, five stars and a button to say it made you laugh. One vote per text and per reader, recognised by a fingerprint of their address, hashed and not reversible; you can change your rating, not take back your laugh. The votes come back into the title’s database at each pass and into the report the editor reads, with the dispatch compared with its discarded angles, without any decision in the chain resting on them.
What is kept
Each title keeps a log: every article read, every pile, every score, every core, every draft, the editor-in-chief’s scores on each of them and the checker’s verdict, the readers’ votes, and every call to a model with its name, its tokens and its cost. A published dispatch can be traced back to the press article it starts from. Calls to the models go out in batches: a pass waits up to twenty minutes for its results, and the next one picks them up if they are late. Nothing is rejected for waiting. Most passes publish nothing: the sort and the re-read turn away far more than they let through.
The characters, the line and the sources of each newsroom are on the Newsroom page of each title. The pact, what is true and what is invented, is on the About page.