How It Works

This page is the editorial guidelines and standards for Citizen’s Daily Brief — how content is selected, assessed, scored, and published, and the trust signals attached to every item.

What This Is

Citizen’s Daily Brief is a daily assessment of what matters and why — with the reasoning shown. It is modeled on the U.S. President’s Daily Brief (PDB): a concise, structured intelligence product delivered to the President each day.

The PDB gives the President an analyst’s view of the world — not raw news, but assessed significance with explicit confidence levels. Citizen’s Daily Brief adapts that concept for the general public.

This is not a news summary. A news summary tells you what happened. CDB tells you what it means, how confident the assessment is, and what to watch for.

How Items Are Selected

Each day, the system ingests content from a curated set of public sources — government feeds, wire services, and major news outlets. It then scores each story cluster on measurable dimensions:

• Source volume — How many independent outlets are covering this?
• Source diversity — Breadth across outlet types (wire, national, specialist, official, international)
• Official action — Did an institution act (legislation, ruling, policy change) vs. commentary?
• Breadth of impact — How many people’s lives, rights, finances, or safety are affected?
• Novelty — Is this genuinely new in the last 24 hours, or incremental coverage of an ongoing story?

The top-scoring clusters become the day’s brief items, typically 5–7. On genuinely slow news days, a shorter brief is published.

Trust Signals

Every item in the brief carries two visible trust signals:

Confidence

• High — Multiple independent sources confirm key facts; official documents or primary evidence exist.
• Moderate — Reported by credible sources but limited independent confirmation, or some factual ambiguity remains.
• Developing — Early reports; situation is fluid; key facts may change.

Agreement

• Broad — Sources substantially agree on the key facts.
• Mixed — Sources agree on the basics but disagree on interpretation or implications.
• Disputed — Material factual disagreements exist between credible sources.

Sources

CDB uses a deliberately small, curated set of public sources. Every outlet is intentionally included and publicly documented. The system uses RSS feeds and public APIs only — no web scraping.

Sources include:

• Government and official feeds (White House, Federal Register, Congressional Record, Supreme Court, SEC, Federal Reserve)
• Wire services (AP, Reuters)
• International news (BBC, The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, NPR)
• Specialist sources (SCOTUS Blog, Nature/Science press releases)
• Major US outlet RSS feeds (headlines and metadata)

The source list is public because transparency about inputs is part of the trust contract. Breadth over volume: a diverse, small set beats a massive indiscriminate corpus.

Automation

Citizen’s Daily Brief is fully automated. There is no human editorial review step. Quality is enforced by:

• Constraining inputs to pre-vetted source material
• Constraining outputs via structured schema and validation rules
• Cross-checking trust signals against measurable source data (e.g., a single-source item cannot be marked “high confidence”)
• Publishing this methodology so readers can evaluate the system’s judgments

What CDB Does Not Claim

• CDB does not claim perfect objectivity.
• CDB does not claim to cover everything important.
• CDB’s judgments are systematic but not infallible.
• The methodology will evolve, and changes will be documented.

Schedule

• Monday–Saturday: Daily Brief (free, everyone)
• Sunday: Weekly Assessment (free, everyone)

Funding

CDB is free and ad-free. The work is funded by readers who choose to support it. Same product for supporters and non-supporters — nothing is unlocked by paying. If CDB is useful to you, you can support the project.

Made by Stalefish Labs

Citizen’s Daily Brief is a project of Stalefish Labs, an indie software studio. Stalefish runs CDB as a civic public service: the editorial product is free for everyone, and the same brief is delivered to supporters and non-supporters alike.

Other Stalefish projects: