About Best-Edit.

Why local news needs a copy desk again.

Newsrooms shrank. Copy desks got cut. Reporters file three stories a day and nobody reads them first.

Readers did not lower their standards. A wrong name in a school board story costs credibility the paper cannot buy back, and in local news credibility is the whole business.

The tools on the market do not fix this. Grammar checkers treat reporting like email. Content generators invent. General assistants edit to whatever each reporter asks, so every desk gets a different standard. None of them knows a nut graf from a kicker, and none of them checks a quote against the tape.

Best-Edit does.

What Best-Edit does for a newsroom.

Edits every story to journalism standards.

Paste the draft. Get the read a city editor gives it: the lede, the structure, the attribution, the passive voice, the logical hole in graf five. The reporter's facts and voice stay. What needs reporting gets flagged, not guessed.

Checks the facts against your own sources.

Add your notes, documents or the meeting minutes and press Check facts. It compares claims with your material, quotes supporting source lines, and flags unsupported or unanchored claims. It uses the material you supplied rather than the open web. Review the results before publishing; the call is still the editor's.

Checks quotes against where they came from.

A quote that is not in your transcript or document is flagged before it is printed. The ones that are come back with the passage beside them.

Turns an audio recording into story leads.

Upload an interview, a press conference or a four-hour village board meeting, or paste the link. Best-Edit returns the transcript with the speakers labeled, finds the stories in it, pulls the quotes, and hands you the bones of the story instead of the audio file you have been avoiding all night.

Writes public-records requests for all 50 states and the federal government.

Tell it what you are looking for. It writes the FOIA request to the right statute, with the deadline, the fee waiver and the appeal path, and keeps your agency contacts in one place. No template hunting, no excuse not to file.

Answers the questions you would ask a desk editor.

Is this ready? What is missing? Is the lede buried? Get an answer in under a minute, in the same conversation as the draft.

Cleans up the copy before it goes.

The routine tightening a copy desk used to do: wordiness, passive voice, house conventions, with a one-line summary of what changed. Human polishing, on demand.

Takes voice notes.

Talk to Best-Edit the way you would talk to an editor on the phone: driving back from the scene, walking out of court, between school pickups. Your words land in the draft, ready when you sit down.

Publishes to the site you already run.

Send the finished draft to WordPress or Newspack as a draft or a live post, or to Arc XP as a draft, from the screen you wrote it on. Running another system? We build the connection. Nothing to migrate.

Who built this.

A veteran journalist consulting for century-old local newspapers found they needed an extra editor. Best-Edit was born.

Best-Edit reflects the editorial practices learned in newsrooms and journalism schools. It understands ledes, nut grafs, attribution and story structure because it was built by someone who wrote under those standards every day. It gives the same read at 9 a.m. and 11 p.m., with no prompts to write and no settings to tune, and every flag comes with the reason, so reporters learn the standard, not just the fix.

Who uses Best-Edit.

Best-Edit is in early release, in the field with four founding news organizations and dozens of papers across Illinois and Iowa. They give notes. We take them.

It is built for weekly and daily local papers, nonprofit and digital newsrooms, freelance reporters and journalism students: the desks that lost their copy editors first. Best-Edit is good, getting better, and aims to be Best.