How it works

01 / Intake

What the sender is asked

Sending a tip is a conversation. Leed asks one question at a time and the sender answers or skips. No account is required and no name is requested up front.

The order is the point. A blank text box returns two sentences nobody can check. Asking what happened, then what evidence exists, then what it risks, returns a lead that already knows its own weaknesses.

The story: What happened, a headline, why it matters now, who is affected, where.
The proof: What evidence exists, what a reporter could independently check, whether anyone will speak on record, and whether it has been shared elsewhere.
The risk: What is sensitive about it, anything a reporter should know before making contact, and how the sender wants to be reached, if at all.

02 / The read

What the AI does, and what it does not

Claude reads each tip and returns a structured brief: the claim, the way to verify it, and the exposure it creates for the sender. It assigns a signal tier in words, never a numeric score, because a number invites false precision about a stranger’s account.

What’s claimed: The assertion, stated plainly.
How to verify: The public record, dataset, or witness that would settle it.
Risk to source: What telling you may cost the person who did.

Ordering

The tip is saved the moment it is sent. The read runs afterwards, in the background, so a slow or failing model can never cost you a lead. If the read fails entirely the lead is still there and still findable.

Held for review

Anything the read flags as risky, along with spam and PR, waits for a person before it reaches any journalist.

03 / Clusters

How separate tips become one story

A single tip is an anecdote. Leed files each lead into a signal cluster: the group of tips describing the same underlying story. Assignment runs after the read, using the beat and region the brief identified.

This is the part a newsroom cannot do by hand. Nine people noticing the same thing over six weeks, arriving through four different inboxes, look like nine unrelated messages. Grouped, they are a story with corroboration already attached, visible before it breaks.

Tier: Hot, Strong, or Watch. A word, never a number.
Weight: How many stories the cluster holds, and how many arrived this week.
Placement: The beats and region it belongs to, so it reaches the right reporter.

04 / Access

Who can see what

Nothing derived from a real tip is public. Verified journalists and admins see leads, clusters, and the person behind each one. Everyone else, including signed-in readers, learns only that a pattern exists.

Enforced in the database

There are no anonymous read grants on leads or clusters. The boundary lives in the schema, not only in the interface, so a bug in a page cannot leak what the database refuses to hand out.

Automatic: Journalists at recognised newsroom domains, verified on sign-in.
Reviewed: Freelance and independent reporters, checked by a person first.
Never: Freemail addresses, for a press account.

Known limitation, stated plainly: visibility today is platform-wide among verified press. Org-scoped workspaces, where each newsroom sees only its own intake, are the next thing we build for a committed pilot.

06 / Desk Agent

The optional agent

Desk Agent is a premium add-on for verified journalists. It walks the clusters on your subjects, ranks what moved since yesterday, and leaves one brief: what to open first, why it matters this morning, and what is still forming.

Recommend only

It never contacts a source, never acts on your behalf, and never changes platform state. Its model input excludes source identity entirely, so it could not reveal a name if asked to.

07 / Questions

Questions people actually ask

Do you publish anything?: No. Leed is a private desk. The one exception is deliberate: a sender polling the status of their own tip receives progress booleans and a tier word, nothing else.
Does the AI decide what gets seen?: It structures and groups; it does not gatekeep. Every lead a journalist can reach stays reachable through search and the board regardless of tier.
What if the read is wrong about a tip?: The tip is stored exactly as sent and the brief sits beside it rather than replacing it. A journalist always reads the original.
Can a source change their mind?: Yes. Contact preferences travel with the lead, and a pending request can be declined at any point.
What does a newsroom actually get?: One queue instead of four inboxes, every tip pre-read and structured, patterns surfaced before they are obvious, and a source-safety story you can put in front of the people you are asking to take a risk.