Practical guide
How to make a personalized news digest
Use an explicit reader priorities, not opaque engagement history. Let the reader edit priorities, inspect exclusions, and preserve high-consequence sources even when they are not frequent interests.[1][2]
Why this gets difficult
Personalization can remove noise, but it can also hide unfamiliar evidence, reinforce old priorities, and make the system's omissions impossible to challenge.[1][2]
A practical way through
- Write the reader's roles, active projects, recurring interests, and important exclusions in plain language.[1][2]
- Separate high-consequence monitoring from preference-based ranking so novelty does not bury risk.[1][2]
- Check included and left-out items after several editions, then adjust the priorities when the same omissions repeat.[1][2]
- Keep source choice under the reader's control rather than allowing clicks alone to reshape the diet.[1][2]
An example
The situation: A reader interested in product strategy clicks mostly on AI stories, while a quiet regulatory source publishes a change that affects the product.[1][2]
What changes: The reader keeps regulatory exposure as a standing priority, so the change can rank despite lower historical engagement.[1][2]
What you get: The brief remains personally useful without becoming a mirror of the reader's most clickable topic.[1][2]
What to watch for
Sources worth keeping
How Scottie helps
Scottie uses a disclosed reader priorities to rank actual source items and lets the reader see everything Scottie read, including material that did not make the brief.[3]