Checklists are unfashionable until you miss a step and hear about it in public. Here is the sequence our desk runs before anything goes live.
Rights and crops. Every image has a trail: who took it, who can license it, and whether the crop changes the meaning of the frame.
Headline stress-test. We write three options, read them to someone who has not read the piece, and keep the one that survives without caveats.
Accessibility pass. Alt text describes what a reader needs from the image, not a caption pun. Charts get a text summary. Links do not rely on color alone.
Final read in mobile view. If the story feels long on a phone, it is long—no matter how “efficient” it looked on a 27-inch monitor.