Create a brief
Step-by-step guide to the 5-step brief wizard.
Create a brief
A brief is the blueprint for an AI-generated article. It defines the topic scope, input sources, editorial tone, and optionally an automated schedule. This guide walks you through the 5-step brief wizard from start to finish.
What is a brief?
A brief tells IANews exactly what to write about and how to write it. When you trigger generation -- manually or on a schedule -- the system uses your brief to discover sources, retrieve relevant content, and generate a fully cited article matching your specifications.
Briefs have four states:
- Draft -- Saved but not yet used for generation. You can keep editing.
- Active -- Ready for manual generation or running on a schedule.
- Paused -- Automation is temporarily stopped. Manual generation still works.
- Archived -- No longer in use. Preserved for reference but cannot generate articles.
The 5-step wizard
Theme
Define what the article is about.
- Title -- A short name for this brief (e.g., "Weekly AI Roundup"). This is for your reference, not the article headline.
- Description -- A sentence or two explaining the scope. The IA uses this as primary context when generating.
- Category -- Select one of the 22 categories (Technology, AI, Science, Health, Business, Crypto, Sports, etc.). This determines which trend data and sources are prioritized.
- Target countries -- Choose one or more of the 50 supported countries. IANews focuses discovery and sourcing on these regions.
Sources
Tell IANews where to find information.
- URLs -- Paste specific article or page URLs as seed sources. These are fetched and used as primary reference material.
- RSS feeds -- Add feed URLs. IANews checks them periodically for new entries and includes recent items as sources.
- Trending topics -- Link active trends from the IANews trend detection system. The system pulls the latest data for those trends at generation time.
- Quality Library -- Browse hundreds of vetted sources organized by domain and reliability tier (e.g., TechCrunch, Nature, Reuters, arXiv). Select the ones relevant to your brief.
See the Sources guide for details on each source type.
Tone and structure
Control how the article reads.
- Tone -- Choose from neutral, analytical, casual, formal, or journalistic. See the Style and tone guide for examples of each.
- Target word count -- Short (~500 words), medium (~1,000 words), or long (~2,000 words).
- Article structure -- The default is introduction, key developments, analysis, conclusion. You can customize section headings and reorder them.
- Style guide -- If your site has a style guide defined, the brief inherits it automatically. You can override it here.
- Language -- Select the output language from the 28 supported languages.
Scheduling
Decide whether articles are generated manually or on a schedule.
- Manual only -- You trigger generation yourself from the brief page. This is the default.
- Automated -- Enable a cron-based schedule. Set the cron expression, timezone, and maximum articles per execution (1 to 5).
See the Scheduling guide for cron expression examples and timezone configuration.
Review
Preview all your settings on a single summary screen. Verify the theme, sources, tone, and schedule. Click Create brief to save.
If you enabled automation, the brief immediately becomes Active and will run on its next scheduled time. Otherwise it starts as a Draft until you activate it.
Start with manual-only briefs while you tune the theme and sources. Once you are satisfied with the output quality, enable automation to generate articles on a schedule.
Generating an article
Once your brief is active, click Generate article on the brief detail page. IANews runs through discovery, content retrieval, and article generation. A typical run completes in about 75 seconds. You can watch the progress in real time via the streaming panel that appears during generation.
What's next?
- Scheduling -- Configure cron-based automated generation
- Sources -- Deep dive into source types and the Quality Library
- Style and tone -- Fine-tune article tone, structure, and length