Newsroom

28 pieces on this desk. The longest of them runs 2439 words. The twelve most recent sit at the top of this page; the other 16 are listed underneath, in the order they were filed.

The general-news desk is here because a paper about one basketball team still has readers who read past it. What lands on this page is everything that is not the Nets and not the league: the money, the buildings, the rules and the people who write them. It is set in the same type and on the same grid as the basketball desks, and it is filed the same way — a headline, a date, a byline where there is one, and the links the piece was filed with.

Nothing on this desk is rewritten after the fact. A piece keeps the wording, the numbers and the outbound links it came in with, and it keeps its address, so anything that linked to it still arrives at it. New items join the top of the feed as they come in.

General news, kept on its own desk and labelled on every card. It is separated from the basketball desks on purpose: the two are written to different standards and at different speeds, and a reader is owed a clear view of which one they are reading. Nothing from this desk is promoted into the basketball sections, and nothing from the basketball sections is filed here.

The wire is the part of the site that moves, so it is also the part where the ordering matters most. Pieces are listed by the date they arrived and nothing is held back or pushed up the page, which means the desk reads as a queue rather than as a front page. There is no editorial ranking on it at all, and nothing on it is presented as more important than what sits above it by date.