newsdesk

Newsdesk is governed generative video for newsrooms. A journalist enters verified facts and their sources, and the system returns a sixty-second explainer video with an editorial policy gate, a named human approval, and a provenance record embedded in the file. It was built for the Backblaze Generative Media Hackathon on Genblaze and Backblaze B2.

The pipeline enforces three deterministic walls: facts, policy, and approval. Wall 1 refuses to validate a story where any fact lacks a citation. Wall 2 checks every block prompt against policy before generation, so a rejected prompt costs $0. Wall 3 exposes assembly only through an approve() transition, and the approver's name lands in the manifest.

Backblaze B2 is the application's only datastore, with five buckets for assets, brand kit, manifests, audit, and run state. The published MP4 has a manifest embedded in the file, and the assets it names are public so a fact-checker can verify the video without trusting the website. The system also records every refusal in a decision ledger whose digest is folded into the manifest.