newsletter-digest-brief

Newsletter Digest Brief Skill

Newsletters are individually reasonable and collectively unreadable — twelve arrivals a week, each 70% padding, each interrupting on its own schedule. The digest move: batch them (the [inbox-unsubscribe-purge](../inbox-unsubscribe-purge/SKILL.md) filter routes them to a label), then process the pile into one brief filtered by the reader's actual interests — items extracted with their source and why-it-matters, everything else dropped with a visible count so the reader trusts the filter instead of re-reading behind it.

What This Skill Produces

• The brief — the items that matter to this reader's stated interests: one line of what + one of so-what + the source link
• The dropped ledger — "skipped 31 items: 12 promos, 9 repeats of the X story, 10 off-interest" — the trust mechanism
• The repeat-collapse — one story covered by four newsletters appears once, best-source-first
• The cadence setting — weekly for most; daily only for genuinely fast-moving beats

Required Inputs

Ask for these if not provided:

• The pile — the newsletters' content (pasted/forwarded), or the label they collect under
• The interest profile — the beats that actually matter to this reader ("AI tooling, pricing strategy, my competitors, nothing about funding rounds") — the filter IS the product, and it needs edges
• The action bias — reading-for-awareness vs. hunting-for-actions; the brief leads with actionable items when the latter

Framework: The Digest Rules

1. Filter by declared interest, ruthlessly: the brief includes what matches the profile and drops the rest — a digest that summarizes everything is the pile again, shorter. Edge cases get one "borderline" line at most, not inclusion.
2. What + so-what + source, one item = two lines: "Vercel shipped edge-side A/B testing (what). Relevant: replaces the tool you're paying $400/mo for (so-what). [source]" — the so-what is written for this reader, which is what separates a digest from a table of contents.
3. Collapse the echo: the same announcement in four newsletters is one item, attributed to the best treatment ("deepest take: X's issue"). The echo-count is itself signal ("covered everywhere = the week's consensus story") and gets a line when heavy.
4. The dropped ledger builds the trust: the counted skip-list ("12 promos, 9 echoes, 10 off-interest") is what lets the reader not re-read the pile — a filter with invisible drops never earns retirement of the source reading.
5. Cadence follows the beat's clock: weekly suits almost everything; daily digest is for beats where a day's lag costs (markets, security advisories). The cadence is chosen once and defended — an "urgent" exception lane exists only for the reader's pre-named topics.

Output Format

Digest: [period] — [N] sources, [M] items kept, [K] dropped

Actionable (if any)

[Items implying a move for this reader, first]

Worth Knowing

[Per item: what — so-what for you. ([best source])]

[Echo notes where heavy: "covered by 4 of your sources"]

Borderline (one-liners)

[…]

Dropped: [K]

[The counted categories — promos / echoes / off-interest]

Quality Checks

• [ ] Every kept item has a reader-specific so-what, not a generic summary
• [ ] Repeats are collapsed with the best source named
• [ ] The dropped ledger is counted and categorized
• [ ] Actionable items lead when the reader's bias is action
• [ ] The interest profile's edges were honored — no scope creep toward "interesting generally"

Anti-Patterns

• [ ] Do not summarize everything — an unfiltered digest is the pile with extra steps
• [ ] Do not write so-whats that would fit any reader — the profile is the point
• [ ] Do not hide the drops — invisible filtering keeps the reader re-reading the sources
• [ ] Do not let one loud newsletter dominate — items compete on interest-match, not sender volume
• [ ] Do not run daily by default — cadence inflation recreates the interruption problem the digest exists to solve