Black Ops Project: the business side of a publishing network in one place

A media network running four enthusiast publications was managing its freelance writers, their pay, its loaner gear and its editorial calendar across spreadsheets, inboxes and memory. We built one internal tool that holds all of it, generates invoices from what was actually published, and scores every post for quality before an editor spends time on it.

The situation

Four publications, a roster of freelance writers, and a different rate for almost every writer-and-site combination. Invoicing meant reconstructing at month end what each person had published and what each piece was worth, from post lists and memory. Review gear went out to writers and came back late or not at all, tracked in an inbox. Trade-show coverage was assigned in a spreadsheet nobody could see from the floor. Every one of these was survivable alone; together they were most of an editor's week.

What we built

One internal tool for the operations side of publishing. Published work is pulled in from each site automatically, so nobody keeps a second list. Invoices are generated from what actually ran, priced by the rules already in place for that writer, that site and that kind of post. Loaner gear is tracked from the request through to the return. The editorial calendar is a calendar you can drag things around on. And every post is scored for how readable it is, how clean the grammar is, and how much of it reads as machine-written, so an editor knows what needs their attention before they open it.

• Writer roster with per-writer, per-site rates
• Invoices generated from work that actually published
• Loaner gear tracked from request to return
• Drag-and-drop editorial calendar across all four sites
• Quality scoring for readability, grammar and machine-written likelihood
• Trade-show floor coverage assigned and visible to everyone

Interface illustrations. Abstracted representations with placeholder content — never client data.

What changed

The business side of the network runs from one screen. Invoicing is generated rather than reconstructed, gear comes back because somebody is reminded, and the quality problems surface before publication instead of in the comments.