Journalism tools

Inkbreaker has two tools for reporting: the Inverted Pyramid Analyzer, which reads how your facts fall from the lead to the close, and the Fact Placeholder Tracker, which finds the markers you leave for facts you still need to confirm. Both are Pro tools. Both read your draft and leave it exactly as you wrote it.

You can open either one two ways:

• On its own page, from Tools then Journalism.
• Inside the editor, from the tools panel, when your piece's writing type is Journalism.

In the editor panel the Inverted Pyramid Analyzer works on your live draft, so you can check the structure of the section you just wrote without saving first. On its own page you can type or paste a draft straight in, or load one of your saved pieces. The Fact Placeholder Tracker keeps a record of every marker you resolve, so it always scans the saved piece (the editor autosaves; a Rescan picks up new markers within a save cycle).

Inverted Pyramid Analyzer

News writing front-loads the most important facts and lets detail taper off, so a reader who stops early still gets the gist and an editor can cut from the bottom. The analyzer measures how steeply your piece does that.

Paste a draft (or load a piece) and select Analyze. The report has these parts:

• The score and band. One number for how closely the piece follows the inverted pyramid, from the opening down to the close, with a one-word read next to it: Strong, Solid, or Developing.
• Lead, body, and tail. A score for each segment. A short piece reads as lead plus body; six paragraphs or more split into three.
• Five Ws in the lead. A check for who, what, when, where, and why in your opening. A tick means the analyzer found it; a cross means it did not. It also reports your opening sentence length and whether your lead runs long.
• Density trend. Whether detail thins out as the piece goes on, which is what you want, or climbs back up, which usually means a buried point. Each body paragraph is labelled (Opening, Thinner, Denser, Steady), and one that opens on a pronoun like "they" or "this" is flagged, since it leans on the paragraph before it.
• Buried lede warning. If a who, what, when, where, or why shows up only in your tail, the tool names it so you can decide whether it belongs higher up. It also notes a boilerplate "About …" section near the end.
• What to tighten. A short list of concrete fixes pulled from the report: which W to add to the lead, an opening sentence to cut or build out, a lead spread across too many paragraphs, detail that climbs back up, or a fact buried in the tail. When the structure holds, it says so.

The analyzer reads structure, not truth. It cannot tell you whether a fact is right, only where your piece puts its weight.

Fact Placeholder Tracker

Reporters mark facts they still need to confirm with placeholders: TK (newsroom shorthand for "to come"), or a bracketed note like [VERIFY: the budget figure] or [SOURCE]. The tracker finds those markers across a piece or a whole folder so none of them slip into a final draft.

It detects:

• TK and TKTK, as standalone words, in any case (so tk and TKTK both count).
• A run of XX, XXX, or XXXX, the classic placeholder for a figure still to come ("up XX percent"). This is a soft note you can dismiss, since some uses are real.
• Bracketed instructions: [VERIFY: …], [CONFIRM …], [CHECK …], [SOURCE], [STAT], [QUOTE], [FACT CHECK].
• Bracketed fill-ins: [DATE], [NAME], [NUMBER].
• Any other all-caps bracketed note, listed as a lower-priority marker you can dismiss.

Select a piece or a folder and Scan. Each marker shows its type, where it sits, and a snippet of surrounding text. Markers group into Unresolved, Possibly resolved, and Resolved, and you can filter to any of them. Scanning a folder tags each marker with the piece it came from. Copy unresolved drops your open markers into a plain-text checklist you can paste into a to-do list or hand to an editor.

When you confirm a fact and delete its marker from the draft, scan again. The marker moves to Possibly resolved: the tool noticed it is gone but waits for you to say so, because a marker can disappear because you cut the sentence, not because you checked the fact. Mark it resolved (with an optional note on what you confirmed) and it becomes part of the piece's history. If a marker was never real, mark it a false positive to remove it.

Resolved markers are kept as a record. A scan never deletes them, so you always have a trail of what you verified and when.

What these tools do not do

Neither tool writes, rewrites, or grades for you, and nothing is sent to an AI. The Inverted Pyramid Analyzer reads paragraph and sentence shape; the Fact Placeholder Tracker matches the markers you typed. Both are about your structure and your process. The reporting is yours.