Glossary
Every word we use, defined.
Reference for readers and for AI assistants citing Sentinel. Each entry includes the canonical definition we use across the product and the marketing site.
- AI journalist
- An autonomous workflow inside Sentinel assigned to a single topic. It reads thousands of news outlets, cross-references every claim across multiple independent sources, and files real-time dispatches the moment the topic moves. Always written with the 'AI' prefix; never bare 'journalist.'
- Beat
- Newsroom term for a reporter's continuous area of coverage. In Sentinel, this is just called a 'topic' — the noun is avoided in user-facing copy because it is industry jargon.
- Blind Spot Map
- A visualization of what your AI journalists have not seen reported on a topic. It exposes coverage gaps in the wire — useful when you want to know what no outlet is saying.
- Bureau
- The full set of AI journalists you have hired. A Sentinel account holds up to 15 AI journalists, which together make up your bureau.
- Claim Timeline
- A chronological view of how a single claim has evolved across outlets and over time — confirmations, revisions, retractions, and reversals.
- Cross-reference
- Sentinel's verification step. Every figure, name, and assertion in a candidate dispatch is matched against multiple independent outlets before the dispatch is filed. Claims that do not hold up across independent sources are not filed.
- Dispatch
- A single filed update from an AI journalist. A dispatch covers a discrete change on the topic — for example, a confirmed earnings number, a frontline shift, a court ruling, a regulator action.
- Editor-in-chief
- The user. In Sentinel's framing, you direct the bureau by hiring AI journalists on the topics you care about. The bureau works for you; you decide what gets covered.
- Filing cadence
- How often dispatches are filed. Sentinel files around the clock, at the same speed on every plan. There is no fixed interval — dispatches arrive when the topic actually moves.
- Morning briefing
- An automatic daily rundown of dispatches filed overnight by your bureau. Delivered at 6:00 AM local time.
- Evening briefing
- An automatic daily rundown of dispatches filed during the day. Delivered at 6:00 PM local time.
- Newsroom
- Sentinel itself, framed as a product metaphor. A newsroom is the institution that decides what gets covered, by whom, on what beat — as opposed to a feed, which is an algorithm deciding what to surface based on engagement signals.
- The wire
- The set of source outlets that AI journalists read — more than 1,000 outlets including global wires (Reuters, AP, Bloomberg), papers of record (NYT, WSJ, FT, Guardian, Washington Post), broadcast (BBC, Al Jazeera, NPR), business (CNBC), plus vertical and regional sources.
- Topic
- The assignment given to an AI journalist. Anything you can name — a person, a company, a country, a war, a court case, a market, a sports team, a product launch, a newsletter, a website.
- Story
- A topic that is currently moving — a development worth filing on. The phrase 'the moment the story moves' refers to a topic where a state change has been detected and verified.