About SF Daily Brief

How this brief is made

Each night, a program reads the public RSS feeds of a set of San Francisco news outlets and pulls the stories published in the past 48 hours.

An AI model reads those stories and selects the ones it judges most newsworthy for San Francisco readers. It groups the selections by topic and writes a two to three sentence summary of each one, using only the facts in the outlet's own reporting.

What the AI does, and does not do

The AI selects stories, groups them by topic, and writes summaries. It does not report original facts, conduct interviews, or add opinion. It is instructed to attribute every claim to the outlet or person who made it, and to leave out anything the source material does not clearly support.

Editing before publishing

The AI's draft is available to a human editor, who can read it, edit any summary, remove a story, and publish it by hand any time before 10:00 Pacific.

The 10:00 publish gate

If the editor has not published the draft by 10:00 Pacific time, it publishes automatically as ranked. This ensures readers have the day's news on time. Mistakes found after publication, whether the brief went out by hand or automatically, are fixed through the corrections process below.

Corrections policy

When a summary gets a fact wrong, the text is corrected directly and a note is appended to the bottom of the story explaining what changed and when. If a story is pulled entirely, a placeholder replaces it with the reason for removal.

Outlets read

The brief draws on these San Francisco outlets: Mission Local, KQED News, Richmond Sunset News, SFist, The San Francisco Standard, Telemundo 48, El Tecolote, Sing Tao Daily US, World Journal, The Frisc, SF Public Press, The Ingleside Light, Potrero View.

Every story links to its source

Each story in the brief links directly to the original article at the outlet that reported it. The summary here is a starting point; the outlet's own reporting is the full account.

Also from this project

Alongside the daily brief, this project also runs SF Edits, a bot that tracks edits to Wikipedia articles about San Francisco. It posts each edit with a screenshot of the diff, after a human review pass that screens out personal information.