Terms of Service — Your Assignment Desk

Effective date: 30 September 2026
Provider: The Boston Storytelling Collab LLC, a Massachusetts limited liability company, doing business as Your Assignment Desk.

0. Who you are contracting with

Your Assignment Desk is a trade name, not a company. The contracting party is The Boston Storytelling Collab LLC, a Massachusetts limited liability company, which does business as Your Assignment Desk. Every agreement, invoice, and payment runs to that entity.

If you are a newsroom's counsel reading this: the signature block on anything we send you should read "The Boston Storytelling Collab LLC d/b/a Your Assignment Desk." If it does not, tell us before you sign it — an agreement signed in the name of a trade name is an agreement with nobody, and neither of us wants that.

1. What this is

Your Assignment Desk reads public records, public meeting agendas, and public conversation in a defined market, and produces story pitches, draft scripts, and assessments of tips your newsroom receives. Every pitch cites the source it came from.

It is a research and drafting tool for professional journalists. It is not a newswire, not a fact-checking service, and not a substitute for reporting.

2. Accounts

Accounts are created by us on request; there is no public sign-up. Each account belongs to one newsroom and one market.

The market is set when the account is created and cannot be changed afterwards. It forms part of the address of your archive, so moving it would leave everything previously filed unreachable. If you need a different market, tell us before you start filing work and we will create the account correctly.

You are responsible for keeping credentials secure and for what is done under your account. Tell us promptly at hello@thestorytellingcollab.com if you believe an account has been compromised.

3. The output is a draft. Every time.

This clause matters more than any other in this document. Please read it.

Everything the service produces — pitches, scripts, tip assessments, the market ticker — is an unverified draft prepared by an AI system. It may be wrong. It may misread a record. It may describe an allegation in terms that a court has not found and may never find.

• Nothing the service outputs is a statement of fact by us, and nothing in it is verified journalism.
• Every editorial decision remains yours. Whether to assign, report, broadcast, or publish anything is a judgment for your newsroom's editors, made under your own standards and your own legal review.
• Verify before you publish. Each pitch carries the public source it came from precisely so that you can check it. That citation is an invitation to verify, not a substitute for verifying.
• A tip forwarded to your line is an unverified claim by a stranger. The desk's assessment of it is a triage aid, not corroboration.

We design against invention — the system is built to refuse rather than to fill gaps, and to withhold rather than to guess. That is a design commitment, and it is not a warranty that any particular output is accurate.

You are the publisher. We are not. We accept no liability for editorial decisions made using this tool, or for anything you broadcast or publish.

4. Your content, and content from your sources

You keep everything you put in and everything we produce for you. We claim no ownership of your tips, your archive, or your drafts.

You grant us only the narrow, revocable licence we need to run the service for you: to receive, store, process, and display your content back to you, and to transmit it to the sub-processors named in our Privacy Policy for that purpose. That licence ends when you delete the content or close your account.

We do not use your content, or anything your sources send you, to train any AI model, and we do not permit our sub-processors to.

Tips are content written by third parties who are not our users. In forwarding them you confirm you are entitled to do so, and you remain responsible as their controller for how they are handled. We will not review, moderate, or disclose them except as our Privacy Policy describes.

Please read §5 of the Privacy Policy before treating this tip line as a confidential channel. Until your station is sealed, we can read what arrives.

5. Acceptable use

Do not use the service to harass, surveil, or profile private individuals; to attempt to identify anonymous sources belonging to another organisation; to break the law; to attempt access to another newsroom's data; to resell or sublicense the output as a data feed; or to overwhelm the service or the public sources it reads.

Do not present the output as verified reporting without doing the reporting.

6. Public sources

The desk reads public data published by government bodies, courts, and other public institutions. Those sources go down, change format, publish late, and are sometimes wrong. We do not warrant the accuracy, completeness, or availability of anything published by a third party, and a quiet morning may mean the records are quiet, or may mean a source is broken. The desk reports which sources answered so you can tell the difference.

7. Availability

We aim for the service to be available whenever your newsroom needs it, but we do not currently offer a service level agreement, and there is no guaranteed uptime, support response time, or maintenance window. If we ever agree a service level with a newsroom it will be in a separate written agreement that says so.

8. Fees

The service is currently provided without charge. There is no billing mechanism, and nothing in these terms obliges you to pay anything.

If we later agree a paid arrangement, it will be set out in a separate written order form covering price, billing period, taxes, renewal, price changes, refunds, and what happens to your data if an invoice goes unpaid. Those terms will be agreed with you, not imposed by an update to this page.

9. Warranties

The service is provided "as is" and "as available." To the maximum extent permitted by law we disclaim all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that any output is accurate.

10. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost data, or reputational harm — including any claim arising from a decision to publish or broadcast.

Our total aggregate liability for all claims is limited to the greater of the fees you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or one hundred US dollars ($100). While the service is provided without charge, that means $100.

Some jurisdictions do not allow these limits, in which case they apply only as far as the law permits.

11. Indemnity

You will indemnify us against claims arising from your content, your use of the service, your breach of these terms, and anything you publish or broadcast — including defamation, privacy, and newsgathering claims.

We expect a newsroom's counsel to want this narrowed, and that is a reasonable conversation to have. Where we agree something different with a customer in writing, that agreement governs over this section.

12. Termination

Either of us may terminate at any time on notice. On termination we will delete your account and its contents; you may request an export first. Sections that by their nature should survive — ownership, disclaimers, liability, indemnity, governing law — survive.

If we terminate for cause, we will say why.

13. Disputes and governing law

These terms are governed by the law of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.

Any dispute arising out of or relating to these terms or the service will be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, and both of us consent to the personal jurisdiction and venue of those courts. This applies to us as much as to you.

We have deliberately not required arbitration. Arbitration is common in this kind of agreement and it has real advantages for a vendor — proceedings stay private and the cost of a bad outcome is capped. We sell to newsrooms, and a company that asks journalists to trust its sourcing while insisting that its own disputes be settled in private is asking for something it will not give. If a customer prefers arbitration, we will discuss it.

14. Changes

We may update these terms. For material changes we will notify account holders before they take effect. Continued use afterwards means acceptance.

15. Contact

hello@thestorytellingcollab.com

The Boston Storytelling Collab LLC 26 Monument Street Charlestown, MA 02129 United States