AA·LAB
01 / 07
A conservator pegs a document to a drying line in a Gaza library, beside manuscript leaves and a Palestine Currency Board note pinned across the wall.
ANADOLU AGENCY · LAB English desk Investigation

Your headline sits here, six to ten words long

Section label · four words maximum

The standfirst runs 40 to 60 words. It names the actors, sets the stakes and tells the reader what the next ten minutes give them that a wire story cannot. Write it last, after the piece is finished.

Scroll
Origins

A chapter title, short enough to read in one breath

The opening paragraph carries the reader from the standfirst into the story. Keep it concrete: one place, one person, one moment. The first line sets in small caps automatically — a wire convention, not decoration.

Body paragraphs run 60 to 90 words. The reading column is fixed at 33rem so the line length stays between 60 and 75 characters at every screen size, which is where sustained reading stops being work.

Use bold for the names that matter — the reader is scanning for actors, and this is how they find them. Links carry a red underline: an earlier AA report sends readers back to the wire, which is the point of the Lab.

Pull quotes are for sentences that change the reader's mind, not for the ones that summarise the paragraph above.

Name, title · Interview, Istanbul
What was there

A working collection, photographed in July 2023

[Placeholder for the editor: two or three sentences introducing the 2023 material — what the collection was, who worked on it, and what the reader is about to look at. Place, date and credit are carried by the captions and must not be repeated here.]

the library stacks, a conservator reaching into them.
A library collection in Gaza, July 2023. Ali Jadallah / Anadolu Agency.
an open hand-coloured atlas held up to the light.
A hand-coloured atlas in a library collection in Gaza, July 2023. Ali Jadallah / Anadolu Agency.
gloved hands, a magnifier and tools over an open manuscript.
Conservation work on a manuscript in Gaza, July 2023. Ali Jadallah / Anadolu Agency.
The sequence

Sticky media on the left, steps that advance it on the right

Schematic of Qasr al-Basha, state one of three: Dar al-Sa'ada, the Mamluk-period name. A site plan with north at the top shows a walled enclosure holding two separate buildings with a wide garden between them; the northern building is picked out, and the main entrance is marked as a gap in its southern façade. Below the plan, an elevation of the main gate shows a pointed-arch gateway, a panel of two facing lions above it, star-plate ornament to either side, a horseshoe arch to the west and a semicircular arch to the east.
Schematic of Qasr al-Basha, state two of three: Qasr Al Radwan, the Ottoman-period name, 1556 to 1690. The same site plan, now with the southern building picked out and the garden between the two buildings shown planted. The gate elevation below is unchanged: pointed-arch gateway, double-lion panel, star-plate ornament, horseshoe and semicircular arches.
Schematic of Qasr al-Basha, state three of three: its later uses — a French occupation in 1799, a British police station in 1918, and a school under Egyptian administration. The whole compound is drawn at full strength: enclosure wall, both buildings, planted garden, and the gate elevation with its pointed-arch gateway picked out alongside the double-lion panel, star-plate ornament, horseshoe arch and semicircular arch.
State one

Dar al-Sa‘ada — the Mamluk-period name of the compound in the Daraj quarter of Gaza City's Old City. [Placeholder for the editor: replace this paragraph with your own reporting, 40 to 70 words. The drawing beside it is a schematic drawn for this template, not commissioned artwork.]

State two

Qasr Al Radwan — the Ottoman-period name, after the family who held it between 1556 and 1690. [Placeholder for the editor: the sequence advances by name and era. Any claim about what has happened to a site belongs in the reporting, attributed to a named source, and never in a template.]

State three

Later uses — a French occupation in 1799, a British police station from 1918, and a school under Egyptian administration. [Placeholder for the editor: three to five steps per sequence. Beyond five, readers scroll past; break it into a second sequence with its own heading.]

The Church of Saint Porphyrius in Gaza City, photographed in 1922: a stone church with a three-arched arcade along its southern side, a minaret rising behind it, and a walled burial ground in the foreground.

Church of Saint Porphyrius, Gaza City, photographed in 1922. Raphaël Savignac, École biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

From above

The Old City, drawn

Diagrammatic aerial of the Old City, tile 1 of 6: the street grid and courtyard houses of the dense fabric, drawn as flat extruded blocks. Diagrammatic aerial, tile 2 of 6: Saint Porphyrius, a long basilica with an apse and a tall bell tower inside a walled forecourt. Diagrammatic aerial, tile 3 of 6: Hammam al-Sammara, a low bathhouse block carrying a cluster of small domes, among the courtyard houses of the Old City. Diagrammatic aerial, tile 4 of 6: the Great Omari Mosque — a large arcaded courtyard, the prayer hall along its south side, and a square minaret. Diagrammatic aerial, tile 5 of 6: Qasr al-Basha, two buildings facing each other across a planted walled garden. Diagrammatic aerial, tile 6 of 6: the fabric of the Old City continuing south, street grid and low massing.

Placeholder artwork · diagrammatic, not surveyed · awaiting a commissioned illustration · 6 tiles, 2400 × 1500 each

The site

Qasr al-Basha, from Anadolu Agency's own footage

A worker crosses an open area of the Qasr al-Basha site. Cut stone is stacked at mid-frame; buildings stand behind.
Qasr al-Basha, Gaza. Anadolu Agency. Silent · 25 seconds · captions are a placeholder
Secondary treatment

When the clip is not ours to host

The block above is the primary treatment: Anadolu Agency's own footage, self-hosted, no third-party player. This one is for material AA cannot host — it stays a local poster and a button until the reader presses play, and requests nothing from Google before that.

Poster frame for the video, inline treatment. Placeholder: replace with the final clip's poster frame.
[Placeholder for the editor: same caption rules. Video: Anadolu Agency.] Watch on YouTube
Locations

Six sites, mapped

Locator plan of the Old City of Gaza showing three marked sites — Qasr al-Basha, the Great Omari Mosque and the Church of Saint Porphyrius — on a graticule of latitude and longitude, with a 200-metre scale bar. Three further sites lie outside the frame.

  • P Palace
  • M Mosque
  • C Church
  • A Archaeological site
  • B Bathhouse
Locations only. Status and sourcing supplied by the editor.

Audio

A clip the reader chooses to start

[Placeholder for the editor: introduce the clip in one or two sentences — who is speaking, where, and when it was recorded. Everything a listener needs before they press play.]

0:00 / 0:45

Placeholder tone · synthetic ambient bed, generated locally. Not a recording of any person or place.

[Placeholder transcript. The transcript is mandatory and it is part of this block, not a link away from it. It is live text, so it is selectable, searchable, translatable and read by a screen reader — and it is reachable without playing a second of audio.]

[Editor: replace this with the full transcript, speaker-labelled, in reading order. Never invent testimony, and never paraphrase a speaker here. If a transcript is not ready, the clip does not ship.]

Testimony

An interview, whole and uncut

[Placeholder for the editor: introduce the speaker in one or two sentences — name, title, affiliation, and where and when this was recorded. None of that is on the page yet because none of it has been supplied; it must come from the desk and never from the footage.]

Gaza. Anadolu Agency. 7 min 41 s · captions are a placeholder, not a transcript

Placeholder — not a transcript. No one has been quoted here and nothing below was heard on the recording. The real transcript arrives with the master and the speaker release.

[Editor: the full transcript goes here, speaker-labelled, in reading order. It is live text so it is selectable, searchable, translatable and read aloud by a screen reader, and it is reachable without playing a second of the interview. Never paraphrase from the audio to fill a gap — if the transcript is not ready, the clip does not ship.]

The network

Who is who

Test portrait 1. A public-domain museum portrait of an anonymous sitter, oil on canvas, 1615, with a band across the lower third reading FOR TESTING — NOT FOR PUBLICATION.

Test portrait 1

Placeholder — layout test only

Forty to sixty words on what this person controls and how they connect to the others on this page. One fact per sentence.

Test portrait 2. A public-domain museum portrait of an anonymous sitter, unfinished oil, 19th century, with a band across the lower third reading FOR TESTING — NOT FOR PUBLICATION.

Test portrait 2

Placeholder — layout test only

Portraits desaturate until hover. Keep the grid to six or nine cards; beyond that the reader stops reading and starts skimming faces.

Test portrait 3. A public-domain tintype photograph of an anonymous sitter, 1850s to 1860s, with a band across the lower third reading FOR TESTING — NOT FOR PUBLICATION.

Test portrait 3

Placeholder — layout test only

Every claim in a card needs to be traceable to something in the reporting file. The cards are where unsourced assertions creep in.

No portraitRights not cleared

Test portrait 4

Placeholder — no image

If a card has no verified portrait, leave the block empty rather than substituting a stock image. Empty is honest, and this is what it looks like beside three filled cards.

Aftermath

The closing chapter

The last chapter returns to whoever the story opened with, and answers the question the standfirst asked. No summary, no moral. The final paragraph should be the one the reader quotes when they send the link on.