Why SOM is shaped the way it is.
The Story Object Model is an open standard for story context in content production. These are the principles that also open the specification: what SOM standardises, what it deliberately leaves alone, and why.
What it is for
Every system in a newsroom holds a fragment of the story, and every fragment is accurate. No system holds the story. SOM writes the story down once, in a form every tool can read, so that a decision made once is obeyed everywhere and provable afterwards. It is a description, not an instruction. Nothing in it tells a tool what to do.
The three nouns were transcribed, not invented. A Story is the thing happening in the world. An Asset is what the newsroom gathers and makes to tell it. A Telling is the moment an asset meets an audience. Journalists already think this way; the model just wrote it down.
What belongs in the standard
It specifies what travels on the bus, not how a publisher organises itself. Two newsrooms can run entirely different workflows and still speak the same story.
It carries publisher-asserted state, not state inferred across sources. What is in the story is what somebody was willing to put their name to.
It carries what enables coordination, not what enables consumption. The test for any proposed field is whether another system needs it to act correctly.
One story is the unit. The scope of the standard is a single story and everything true about it, over time.
Default no, justify yes. A field earns its place by a case made in the open. A standard that accepts everything describes nothing.
Structure is governed; vocabulary grows deliberately. Schema patterns can be permissive. The words that carry meaning cannot, or the same term ends up meaning six things.
How it behaves
Nothing sits in charge. No orchestrator and no central application. Each tool reads the story and decides for itself.
Skills declare, executors act. A Skill states what is true against a rule its newsroom wrote. The tool that owns the executor is the only thing that acts, and silence is a valid outcome.
One writer mints. A story is minted once, by whichever system owns it in that newsroom, and that owner holds the sequence. Never the agency, and never two systems for the same event.
The story republishes in full, never as a delta. A tool switched on halfway through the night reads one object and knows everything.
Binding happens at the editorial act, never at ingest. Media becomes part of a story when a person decides it is, not when it lands.
A transform never lifts a hold. Cutting, reframing or re-versioning an asset cannot launder its compliance position.
Reading leaves no trace. A tool proves it read something by publishing in its turn, which is also why the audit trail is a by-product of how writes work rather than a feature someone built.
Where the standard stops
SOM describes one story and everything true about it, and stops there. It is not the media, not the rundown, not a MAM and not a product, and it replaces nothing you already run. What each newsroom does with what it reads is its own business, and none of it belongs in a standard. A standard owned by one vendor is a product. A standard owned by an industry is infrastructure.
Read conformance for what it means to speak SOM 1.0, and the open register for what is not yet settled.
read the specification