Practical guide
Build a news digest from your own sources
Build the digest as an editorial pipeline. Define the reader, collect only approved sources, resolve canonical items, cluster shared stories, write from readable evidence, and publish the list of what Scottie read with the brief.[1][2]
Why this gets difficult
A news digest is easy to automate badly: collect links, shorten each one, and send a long list. The difficult work is source choice, overlap, ranking, provenance, and honest omission.[1][2]
A practical way through
- Write the reader's priorities, decisions, source boundary, delivery window, and output style.[1][2]
- Collect canonical source URLs and readable text, leaving out anything that cannot be read in full.[1][2]
- Group items by underlying story, then rank clusters and distinct contributions.[1][2]
- Generate the rundown and full items, attach validated input links, and retain included and left-out states.[1][2]
An example
The situation: Twelve feeds produce forty items, including several press-release rewrites and two independent analyses.[1][2]
What changes: Canonical URLs are resolved, reruns collapse into shared clusters, independent analyses remain separate, and the brief is written from the reviewed bodies.[1][2]
What you get: The reader receives a small story-based edition and can inspect all forty inputs without seeing a forty-link email.[1][2]
What to watch for
Sources worth keeping
How Scottie helps
Scottie follows this source-to-brief pattern with clear reader priorities, full issue reading, overlap grouping, an Executive brief or quick links with descriptions, and original links attached afterward.[3]