Drafts & Publishing

Drafts are where Mediastilo's work shows up. Material from your Sources that aligns with your Brand becomes article drafts you can review, edit, and publish.

The draft lifecycle

Each draft moves through these stages:

Suggested: Mediastilo has spotted aligned source material and proposed a draft idea. Nothing has been written yet; you decide whether it's worth generating.
Draft: Mediastilo is generating (or you're working on) the article content.
Ready: the article is generated and ready for your review and edits.
Published: the draft has been pushed to your site.

A draft you don't want takes a fifth path: Turned down. It leaves the main list but isn't destroyed, and you can put it back at any time. See Turning a draft down.

Every draft also carries an alignment score, how closely it matches your Brand DNA, so you can prioritize the strongest matches.

Generating content

From a suggested draft, Generate turns the idea into a full article using your Brand. On supported plans you can also Regenerate to produce a fresh take if the first one isn't quite right.

Generating and regenerating a draft use credits. See Credits & Billing.

Drafts are written with headings, subheadings, and concrete specifics (the names, dates, figures, and places the source actually reported) rather than atmosphere alone. To pin down the exact shape a piece takes (its sections, its key-fact block, its length), declare a content format in Brand → Structure. The format marked default is applied to every draft that doesn't name one, including the drafts the overnight pipeline writes for you.

Gaps: what the source didn't say

When a piece needs a fact the source material never stated (a ticket price, a start date), Mediastilo leaves it out and records it as a gap on the draft rather than inventing a plausible-looking value. Gaps show up on the draft as a short list of what's missing. Treat them as the checklist to clear before you publish.

"Source material" means the article and the documents it links to: every figure, date and name in a draft has to appear in one of them. Where a decision or a budget sheet couldn't be read, the gap says so and names the file, so the fix is one click at the source rather than a number nobody can trace. See Linked documents.

Use source as-is

Prefer to start from the original material instead of an AI write-up? On a suggested draft, Use source as-is copies the raw source content straight into the draft, no AI and no credits, and opens it in the editor. You can edit it by hand from there, or hit Generate at any point to rewrite it from the same source (your verbatim copy is kept in version history first).

You can make this the default for every new draft under Settings → Pipeline → Copy source instead of writing. When enabled, the pipeline seeds new drafts with the source content instead of generating, leaving the writing entirely up to you. In this mode each source article becomes its own draft: Mediastilo never combines unrelated articles into a single copied draft.

Where a draft came from

Every draft shows the publication it was built from: a small source chip with the publisher's name and domain (e.g. Grad Čakovec · cakovec.hr) on both the draft cards and the editor. If a draft was built from more than one publication, you'll see a chip for each, so a multi-source draft is obvious at a glance.

Editing in the editor

Open any draft in the Editor to refine it, adjust the wording, structure, and details until it's exactly right. The editor is a rich text canvas: headings, lists, quotes, and links render the way they'll be published, so you edit the finished piece rather than raw formatting marks. Use the toolbar for headings, bold, italic, links, and lists. Your changes are saved as you work.

Select any text to bring up a quick menu. Alongside the formatting buttons, on supported plans you can ask AI to Rewrite, Shorten, Expand, or change the Tone of just that passage; the rest of the draft stays untouched.

When a draft was built from source articles, Compare with source (top of the editor) opens the original article(s) alongside your draft, read-only, so you can check the draft against what was actually reported.

Each article there also lists the documents it linked to — the decision, the budget sheet — and for the ones Mediastilo read, Show the text we read expands the extracted text right in the pane. That's how you verify a figure like 49,887.50 EUR without downloading the PDF and searching it by hand. A document that couldn't be read says so, and names why.

To rework the whole draft, open the AI menu in the toolbar: choose a tone and add any specific instructions (for example "make it shorter" or "stronger intro"), then Regenerate. You'll get a Review changes panel showing exactly what the AI changed. Keep it, or Discard to restore the previous version.

Your rewrites also teach the brand voice. A substantial reworking is read for what it says about how you write, and once a day the editor may offer two short samples and ask which one sounds like you — usually about the part of the voice your own rewrite just touched. Answering sharpens it; the ✕ closes it, costs nothing, and decides nothing. See Brand.

The assistant: telling the draft what to change

Open Assistant in the editor toolbar and talk to the draft in your own words: "add a section on how to get there", "the intro is too flowery", "turn the practical bits into bullets", "drop the last section". It makes that change and nothing else.

That last part is the point. The assistant edits only the sections you asked about; every other part of the piece, including the sentences you rewrote by hand, comes back untouched. So you can keep working on the draft between turns without the AI quietly undoing you.

It works from the sources, not from imagination. The source articles ride along with every turn, so "add the practical details" pulls real ones out of them. When the sources genuinely don't have what you asked for, the assistant says so and asks you for it. It won't fill the hole with something plausible.
You can ask questions too. "Is this too long?" gets an answer, not an edit; nothing changes and no version is written.
Every turn is undoable. A turn that changed something shows an Undo button, and lands in History like any other version.
It offers you the next step. After each turn you get a few one-tap suggestions written from the draft as it now stands, not a fixed menu. If the assistant had to tell you a fact is missing, one of them will be an invitation to supply it.
It writes in the language of the draft. A Croatian piece stays Croatian, no matter which language you type your instruction in.
You can point at a passage. Select any text in the draft and hit Ask… in the toolbar that appears. The passage is attached to your next message as a reference, and the turn is scoped to those words; the rest of the section comes back exactly as you had it. Use it when the one-tap rewrite buttons aren't specific enough: "turn this into bullets with the actual prices".

You don't have to wait around while it thinks: your message goes into the thread immediately and the reply lands when it's ready. If a turn fails, it says so and offers to try again.

The assistant is available on the same plans as Regenerate.

It can check the web, if you ask it to. On plans that include grounding, "what was the final grant amount?" can send the assistant to Google Search; it comes back with a cited answer and writes it in, rather than guessing. If the web can't answer, it tells you instead of inventing a figure. See below.

What it can go and look at

The assistant does not only read the draft in front of it. Before it tells you a fact is missing, it can go and find it — and every lookup it makes shows up as a line above the reply, so you can see where an answer came from.

Your own collected material. The same corpus Signals holds. This matters most on a draft written from a brief rather than from articles: such a draft cites nothing, but the publisher very often already covered the subject, and the figure you are asking for is in a piece of your own.
The brief the draft was made from. Whatever you wrote when you created the draft stays in front of it for every turn. Paste a link into the brief and you can refer back to "the page I gave you" twenty turns later without pasting it again.
A page you name. Give it an address and it will open the page and read it. It will not open an address it worked out for itself — a made-up address is a made-up source.
The file behind the link. Official notices are often a page of attachments and no prose. It can open a PDF or a Word document — including the older .doc format — and read what is inside.
A picture on the page. Some figures are only ever published as a screenshot of a table. It can look at the pictures on a page it was given and read them, and it will tell you the number came from an image rather than from text. If it cannot read them, it says so instead of guessing what they show.
Your source articles, re-read. It can fetch a source article again to see whether the publisher has amended it since you collected it.
What your integrations measure. With Google Search Console connected it can read what you are actually shown for; with a CMS connected it can read what that site says is published. Both read-only, and both only once the connection exists.

It will not claim to have read something it did not open, and if every lookup it tried came back empty it says exactly that and asks you — rather than producing a figure that sounds right.

Grounding a fact in Google Search

Gaps exist because a draft won't invent a figure the sources didn't state. Grounding with Google is the other way to close one: instead of asking a person, you ask the live web, and only a cited answer gets written in.

In the editor, open the Grounding panel:

Ground researches the draft's subject and adds any facts it can source, each with a link to where it found them.
Fill gaps takes the draft's open gaps one at a time and tries to source each. A gap the web can answer becomes a cited line; one it can't stays a gap.

Two rules make this trustworthy:

Only cited facts are used. If Google doesn't return a real source, nothing is written — the gap stands. Grounding never converts a search into a guess.
You're shown the search. Each finding lists its sources, and — as Google's terms require — the Search Suggestions Google returned, so you can retrace the query yourself.

Grounding spends metered credits (roughly one credit per eight searches, capped at two per question) and is only available on plans that include it. See Credits & billing. It can also run automatically during the overnight pipeline if you switch it on per brand in Settings — off by default, because each run costs credits.

Seeing which facts were live-searched

Once a grounded fact is written into the body, the draft remembers where it came from and shows you — so a searched fact is recognizable at the point you read it, not only in the panel:

In the editor, a grounded sentence is subtly highlighted; hover it to see that it came from a Google search and which source answered it. This marker lives in the editor only — it is never part of what you publish. Your published article carries no Mediastilo chrome.
When you ask the assistant to check something on the web, its reply is labelled Searched Google, with the number of sources it consulted.
On the drafts list, a draft that contains live-searched facts is tagged Grounded, and the Grounding panel header counts how many of its facts were.

If you later rewrite a highlighted sentence, its marker simply falls away — the label only ever stays on text that still matches what was searched.

Version history

Every draft keeps a version history. Open History in the toolbar to see past versions, preview any of them, and restore one if an edit or regeneration went the wrong way. Nothing is lost.

Turning a draft down

Not every draft is worth your time, and saying so is how Mediastilo gets better. The ⊘ button turns a draft down and asks you to pick why. It sits wherever you can judge a draft: on the card, at the end of the row in table view, and in the editor's top bar — including in the ⋯ menu on a narrow screen — so you can turn one down after reading it, not only from the list.

Reason	Use it when	What it changes
Off our beat	The subject isn't something you cover.	Counts against that topic in what you cover, as heavily as publishing a piece counts for it. Sits alongside your Signals decisions.
Already covered	You've written about this story already.	Says the same story reached you twice.
Doesn't sound like us	The subject is right, the writing isn't.	Shakes Mediastilo's confidence in the voice axes that draft was written with, so it starts asking about them again. Never your topics.
Thin or inaccurate	It gets things wrong, or there isn't enough here to publish.	Says the writing failed. It deliberately teaches nothing about your brand.
Missed the moment	Worth covering, but the story has moved on.	A timing signal, not a topic one.
Weak source	The article behind it isn't good enough to write from.	Reads against that Source.
Something else	Anything the list doesn't cover.	Requires a short note, so the reason is usable.

You can add a note to any reason; for Something else the note is required.

The draft is kept, not deleted. Turning one down moves it to the Turned down filter, where Put this draft back restores it to exactly the stage it was in. Undo is also offered in the toast right after the act. A draft you've already published can't be turned down.

Picking the honest reason matters more than picking one quickly: each reason points at a different part of the system, and they are never averaged together. Ten drafts turned down as Off our beat means your coverage is drifting from what Mediastilo thinks you write about; ten as Thin or inaccurate means nothing about your topics at all and is a problem with the generation itself.

When a turn-down moves something, the confirmation says so — "Now steering away from Local sport", or "Less sure about Sentence rhythm now — we'll ask". Most turn-downs move nothing on their own, and that's deliberate: it takes more than a single one to change a settled belief. Putting the draft back withdraws whatever it taught, and says that too.

Scanning for new drafts

Mediastilo proposes drafts automatically on each pipeline run, but you can Scan on demand to have it look at your latest aligned material and suggest new drafts right away.

Publishing

On plans with publishing enabled, Push sends a finished draft straight to a connected destination, WordPress, Ghost, or a webhook, and records the published post with a link back to it. You can push to several destinations at once by selecting them. For a selected WordPress destination, the editor lets you set the post type, categories, tags, and whether it goes out published or as a draft (pre-filled from your saved defaults and adjustable for this push). Connect a destination first in Integrations; the full setup for each is in Integrations.

Publishing and regeneration are plan-gated features. If you don't see them, check your plan in Credits & Billing.

Tips

Work from the alignment score down, the highest-scoring drafts are the most on-brand.
Sharpen your Brand if drafts aren't matching your voice; better brand input means better drafts.