The Tape

The Tape is the reporting surface. It is a log, ordered by time, bounded by count rather than by calendar: the last fifty things that happened, grouped by day, whatever the dates. A quiet month and a busy week render the same way, because the instrument has no opinion about cadence.

Every line on it is something a journalist did: read the email, read it again, replied, wrote the story, or ran a story nobody pitched. The only lines that belong to the practitioner are sends, and those are the quiet ones. Most reporting counts what comms did. The Tape records what the press did with it.

Lines that arrived since the practitioner last looked are marked. Nothing is coloured except the verdict on a clip.

Reads

Each instance of outreach carries a tracking pixel — a one-pixel image the practitioner pastes into the email. When the email is opened, the pixel is fetched, and the fetch is logged with its time, network origin, and user agent. The Loop never sees the email itself.

A fetch is not a read. Mail clients prefetch images, corporate scanners open every link, and proxies fetch on behalf of people who never looked. A classifier on the tracking service grades each fetch, and each instance resolves to one of four grades: confirmed, a human fetch from a real origin; likely, a fetch through a proxy that fires only when a person opens; uncertain, a fetch that could be either; or none. The read rate counts confirmed and likely. Uncertain is never counted as a read.

A reply outranks the pixel. If the journalist wrote back, the email was read, whatever the pixel saw. Repeated fetches from one journalist within an hour are one reading session on the Tape — a reporter working a story opens the email many times — and the instance keeps every fetch for the record.

The read rate

The number at the top of the Tape is the share of the practitioner's last twenty-five instances that were read, against the share across everything they have ever sent. It is self-referential by design. There is no industry average in the instrument and none is implied.

The direction mark says whether the recent window sits above or below the all-time baseline. It is not coloured, because the instrument does not know whether a quiet result was good or bad. A crisis statement that nobody reads is a success; a briefing that gets no reply may be exactly what was wanted. The tool reports movement. The practitioner supplies meaning.

The window is measured in instances, not days. Thirty instances in one afternoon and thirty across a quarter produce the same denominator.

Pushes, instances, contacts

A push is one named effort — a release, a statement, a data drop. An instance is one contact in one push. A contact is a person at an outlet.

Contacts enter the instrument one at a time, by name, at the moment the practitioner decides to pitch them, or when they are credited on coverage the practitioner documents. There is no import and no bulk add. The list is not a media database; it is the set of editorial stakeholders who know the practitioner's clients by name, because they were pitched or because they wrote about them. There is no third door.

A push can be locked when its work is done and reopened when the news cycle brings it back. Reopening is one click, because that is ordinary.

Clips and echoes

When coverage runs, the practitioner documents it as a clip against the instance that earned it: the headline, the link, the date, and the byline. A clip cannot be saved without a byline — a person, or an honest Staff or Wire — and the person becomes a contact, with no email required.

Coverage that nobody pitched is an echo. It is logged against the push, with its byline, and the writer becomes a contact too; someone who covered a client unprompted is the most valuable kind of stakeholder to know.

Each clip is then checked by Cited, Bread & Law's protocol for AI discoverability, and the verdict — whether major AI platforms can retrieve the piece — is the one coloured mark on the Tape. The last line of a good week is not that a story ran; it is that a journalist wrote it, a person read it, and a machine can find it.

The Wire

When a practitioner turns the Wire on, The Loop publishes a read-only projection of the Tape to a gated address and gives them a code. Anyone with the code sees what journalists did with that practitioner's outreach, as it happens, until the practitioner turns it off. Then it is gone.

What travels is outcomes: who read the email and when, who replied and what they said, what ran and whether machines can read it. What does not travel is process: no read rate, no count of who was pitched, no list of who has not answered, no locations, no addresses. Those stay with comms. A stakeholder can watch the work land without being handed a number to manage it by.

Each day that outreach went out carries a line naming the pushes that moved — never how many, never to whom. The owner may set where the Wire starts and say why; that line is the last thing a reader sees.

What The Loop does not claim

A read is a fetch by a person. It is not attention, interest, or intent. The instrument can say that a human opened the email, roughly when, and roughly where. It cannot say that they read past the first line.

Cadence is not a signal. Nothing in the instrument measures, displays, or implies how often the practitioner sends. Months of silence followed by a week of dozens of statements is what the work looks like, and the Tape does not editorialise about the silence.

Facts, not rates, leave the building. The read rate, the denominators, and the worklists are the practitioner's own. The one artifact designed to travel is an instance's record — who, when, and the timestamps of each read — as a timestamped attestation of access, on the Wire. Process stays with comms.

The data stays on the machine. The Loop is local-first. Contacts, pushes, responses, and clips live in a database on the practitioner's own computer. The instrument makes a small, enumerated set of outbound connections — the tracking service, to serve pixels and return graded reads; Cited, to check a clip; a geolocation lookup; and a font — and it lists them inside the product.

About this demo

The people, outlets, and findings on the demo page are invented. The shape is real: the demo renders a fictional week with the same rules the working instrument uses — the same grades, the same reading sessions, the same read rate, the same marks. No tracking pixel fires on this site and no classifier is running; the grades are part of the fixture.

The working instrument shows a practitioner what named journalists did with their email. That is nobody's business but the practitioner's, which is why this is a fiction and not a screenshot. The working instrument's Tape is shared only through the Wire, only by the practitioner, only as outcomes.