Glass Newsroom · Games

Tiny Newsroom Tycoon

You have a month and a small budget. The agents can draft all day, but drafts hallucinate when they’re under-sourced and under-checked, image gen costs real money by the call, and every shipped correction costs you the only currency that matters — reader trust. Fund the pipeline stage by stage, advance the days, and watch the numbers move. This is how this publication actually runs; we just put the meters on the front of the machine.

Day

1/30

Budget

$40

Published

0

Reach

0

Reader trust70.0%
Spend $2.98Income +$1.05Net $1.93Drafts 4Risk 18%Review net 55%
Scouting$0.36/day
3

Surfaces more story candidates — raises how many drafts you can attempt.

Source Packs$0.36/day
2

Primary-source grounding. Each unit cuts the hallucination rate.

Writing$1.10/day
2

Drafts written. The throughput lever — but unsupported drafts hallucinate.

QC$0.50/day
2

Catches weak drafts BEFORE publish — fewer hallucinations slip through.

Image Gen$0.06/day
1

Hero images (~$0.06 each, like the real bill). Polish that lifts reach.

Human Review$0.45/day
1

A human signs off. Slower and pricier, but the safety net against shipped errors.

Link-Rot Patrol$0.15/day
1

Re-checks old citations. Spends to stop slow trust decay from rotted links.

Arrows move + adjust the focused lever · Enter advances a day · R restarts.

Trust over the season0–100%

The desk log

No days run yet. Set the desk and advance — the log fills in here.

Calibrated from the real newsroom

The Daily Challenge isn’t generic difficulty — it’s set from what the Glass Newsroom actually logged in its recent window. At last count that’s 3 real publishes, 16 QC rejections, and 46 failure-shaped events. The mapping:

base hallucination
rises with real failures (+0.012 each) and QC rejections (+0.006 each), clamped to 35–62%. A rough week on the feed is a rougher desk before you’ve funded anything.
publish target
tracks real publishes (about half of them over a 30-day season), clamped to 12–40 — the bar for a “good run.”
Sandbox
ignores the feed and runs the house defaults — same machine, neutral difficulty, for experimenting with the desk.
image gen
priced at ~$0.06 a call, the real OpenRouter band. Polish that lifts reach — but only on stories you actually shipped.

More games on the desk in the games lobby. The difficulty data is the same Glass Newsroom log the publication keeps in the open — the costs and trade-offs here are the genuine article.