brief.md is your portable brand context. Open standard. Plain markdown. Yours, not the vendor’s.
A structured markdown file that captures your voice, credentials, brand context, and available assets. PRAPI uses it to score journalist queries, draft pitches in your voice, and ship submission packages with the right assets attached. The spec is open. The format is portable. The trademark is held by The Integrity Framework, not by PRAPI.
What brief.md is.
A structured markdown file with frontmatter that any tool can parse. Think of it as the source-of-truth document for who you are as an operator and what your brand is about.
Your voice rules. Your credentials. Your brand context. Your available assets. All in one file that lives in a Git repository (hosted by us by default, or your own).
When PRAPI drafts a pitch, it reads your brief.md. When the voice validator runs, it reads your brief.md. When a journalist asks for a headshot, the submission composer pulls the URL from your brief.md. The substrate handles it; you stop hunting for assets every time.
The format is portable. Other tools can implement the spec compatibly so you can move your brand context between them. PRAPI’s value capture comes from execution quality, not data ownership.
Why an open spec instead of a proprietary database.
Every existing PR tool locks your brand voice in a vendor system. Cancel the subscription, your settings disappear with it. brief.md inverts that.
The status quo.
- Brand voice lives in a SaaS dashboard
- No export, or export is screenshots
- AI assistants can’t read it
- Search engines can’t surface it
- Migrate tools, start over from scratch
The open spec.
- Brand voice lives in a markdown file you control
- Plain text — commit to Git, paste anywhere
- AI assistants ingest it as context
- Search engines index your published brief
- Move tools, take your brand context with you
The trademark is held by The Integrity Framework, not by PRAPI. Other tools that implement the spec can use the trademark under license.
Structure: operator brief plus one brand brief per brand.
You write your operator brief once. Then one brand brief per brand. PRAPI merges them at draft time so your founder credentials and voice rules don\u2019t get duplicated across brands.
The operator brief
Describes you across all your work. Your voice rules (short sentences, no em dashes, no corporate jargon). Your credentials. Your public links. Things that are true regardless of which brand you\u2019re representing.
---
name: Tom Pinder
role: Founder
voice_rules:
- short sentences
- no em dashes
- no corporate jargon
credentials:
- USMC veteran
- Founder, StartVest LLC
links:
linkedin: linkedin.com/in/tjpinder
---One brand brief per brand
Describes one specific brand. Voice overrides at the brand level. Visual identity. Brand context and positioning. Available assets like headshots, press kits, product screenshots. PRAPI keeps these per-brand so each brand gets its own voice, audience, and digest.
---
brand: prapi
name: PRAPI
positioning: PR system for multi-brand operators
voice_overrides:
- direct, dry, slightly self-deprecating
acceptable_outlets:
- tech press, founder media
decline_outlets:
- sponsored-content farms
assets:
headshot: cdn.prapi.dev/h/tom.webp
---Merge at draft time. When PRAPI drafts a pitch for a specific brand, it merges your operator brief with that brand’s brief. Your voice rules cascade. Brand-specific overrides win where they exist. You author your credentials once at the operator level, and every brand inherits them automatically.
Visibility scopes: public, pitch-shareable, private.
Different parts of your brief are visible to different audiences. You control what\u2019s in each scope by tagging sections. PRAPI respects the tags everywhere it serves your content.
Visible to anyone who fetches your brief URL
Your name, your role, your voice rules, your public links. Search engines index this. AI assistants ingest it for context. Third-party tools can read it as the publicly portable layer of your brand.
Visible to journalists who receive a pitch from you
Plus everything in public. Your headshot URL, your bios, your founding story, your available assets. Journalists get the full context when they evaluate your pitch \u2014 not just a body of text.
Visible only to you and your workspace members
Your strategic priorities, your scoring weights, your internal notes about which outlets matter to you, your decline reasons. Operational state that informs PRAPI but never leaves your workspace.
Two ways to edit. Both produce the same result.
The dashboard is the default for non-technical users. Git is the default for technical users who want full control. You can switch between them anytime; the conflict UI handles the rare case where both edit at once.
Click, type, save.
Open your brand profile, edit any section, hit save. Changes apply to drafts and matches immediately. When you\u2019re ready, publish to make the changes permanent.
Default for most operators.
Edit the markdown file directly.
Your brief lives in a Git repository as a markdown file. Edit in any text editor, commit, push. PRAPI picks up the change automatically. Treat your brand context the way you treat code: branches, pull requests, history.
Default for technical users who want full control.
If both surfaces edit at once. If you edit in the dashboard while a teammate edits in Git (or your past self pushed a change you forgot about), PRAPI surfaces the conflict and lets you resolve it. No silent overwrites. No lost work. The Git file stays canonical; PRAPI’s database is a cache of it.
When to publish your brief publicly.
Optional. Most operators don\u2019t publish until they\u2019ve used PRAPI internally for at least a month. The protocol benefits compound when you\u2019re ready, not before.
Get the brief right first
Voice rules, brand context, and visual identity settle into something you\u2019re confident sharing. Some operators initially overshare in public scope and pull content back to pitch-shareable after seeing the result.
The infrastructure caches it
Search engines index your brief once. Pulling it back changes how it gets cached and crawled. The publish-publicly decision is reversible at the file level (you control the URL) but cache effects take time to fade.
Your URL, your domain
Publish at yourcompany.com/brief.md or at a URL we host for you. AI assistants ingest it. Future journalist tools consume it. Your brand context becomes part of the open web, not trapped in a vendor database.
PRAPI dogfoods this. Our own brief lives at prapi.dev/brief.md. Fetch it. Read it. The same surface every PRAPI customer gets when they choose to publish.
The spec is stewarded by The Integrity Framework, not by PRAPI.
A separate organization holds the trademark and stewards the specification. PRAPI is the canonical implementation, not the only allowed implementation.
The structural separation matters. If PRAPI gets acquired, shuts down, or changes its business model, the brief.md spec keeps going. Your brief.md files keep working with other tools that implement the spec.
Other tools that implement the spec can use the trademark under license from The Integrity Framework. Compatibility is verified, not vibes.
Get started.
Three paths in. Pick whichever matches where you are right now.
Generate a starter brief.md.
Free, no signup. Fill in what you have, leave what you don\u2019t. Download the file. Use it with PRAPI or any tool that implements the spec.
Open the generatorRead PRAPI\u2019s own brief.md.
The dogfood. The same surface every customer gets when they publish their brief publicly. Plain markdown, fetchable from any HTTP client.
Fetch /brief.mdSign up for PRAPI.
Author your brief in the setup wizard or commit it to Git. Connect your inboxes. Watch matched, drafted pitches land in your inbox in real time. The substrate handles the rest.
Sign inYour brand context should be portable. That’s why we wrote the spec.
brief.md is yours, not ours. The format is open. The reference parser will be open-sourced once the spec stabilizes. PRAPI is the canonical implementation; other tools can implement compatibly and you can move between them.