How we choose the best journalism in the world.

Felix is the head curator at Compass News. We decided that maybe their jobs should be less mysterious, because their work is at the heart of what we do. So we sat down with Felix to talk through exactly how we go about choosing the stuff that you see on our app and website.

Can you briefly tell us what a Curator does?

We sort of … run the app. We’re the ones who make sure there’s always juicy new articles for you when you open it up, morning and night. We choose the articles, tell you why they’re worth reading, and summarise them, all for your convenience.

We also write up little 100-word overview of the big news stories of the day to make them readily digestible anytime, anyplace.

What does a day look like for you and your team?

Well, someone is always working. Ok, that’s not strictly true. We don’t have anyone around (yet) between 2 and 4am, but we like to dream. I wake up at 4am daily to get stuff out before users wake up, then I’m usually in the office until mid afternoon, getting stuff ready for the evening.

But by then my loyal team (shout out to my bois Soila, Harry and Katie) get involved from about 9am, working right through the night, making sure we’ve always got our wonderful users covered.

I hope you don’t mind me saying but ‘choosing the news’ sounds like it could get a bit complicated. Lots of us are aware that whittling the news down to a few, select stories has its difficulties, how do you go about it?

Well it’s funny you should ask that, we have a series of curation guidelines that we put together to help us make sure we keep standards high. I will explain…

It’s got to be well written

We’re basically all about saving people time. We want to help you cut through the noise, stripping out the rubbish and just giving you the 20 or so articles daily that we think are really, honestly worth your time.

But the first question you’ll ask right away is “what does that even mean?”

The really basic requirement, as stupid as it sounds, is that the articles we pick and choose for you should be well written.

And that itself is obviously wildly subjective, so there’s a fair bit of personal judgement floating around in the editorial decisions we make. That said, we do have a few really basic things that we look out for as red flags for stuff we should really be avoiding.

• First off, we’re not fans of flowery language that masks lack of content.
• More specifically, we don’t like massive, run-on sentences. Our sweet spot is well-edited, word efficient, and clear.
• It has to be understood by the average reader. Part of what we want to do is help busy people understand complex stuff. Jargon is confusing and alienating, and we don’t like it.
• We think there are, admittedly fairly rare, articles where the enjoyment really does come from the quality of prose itself, not just the subject matter. That’s a pretty good sign something is worth your time.

The content has to be interesting

Obviously baseline readability isn’t good enough. In real terms, we’re looking at slimming down something like 3000 articles down to 20 day-in-day-out. That meaning our standards are pretty exacting.

Generally, we like to be able to say of every individual chosen article that it exhibits of the following:

Firstly, articles can be about something that’s really need-to-know. This is often stuff that’s heavily, sometimes excessively represented in the news cycle, to the point where it can be hard to get a grip of the fundamental facts.

Secondly, we place a premium on novelty value. In fact, we have an entire section (we call it “Off track”), devoted to this kind of stuff. This tends to be slightly more eccentric stuff on obscure topics. The one that pops into my head right now is something about a guy’s journey to a tiny island in Japan that’s got no humans, just the world’s highest concentration of rabbits, exploring how they all got there. These articles are entertaining, interesting, and might be able to help you out if you ever get stuck on an awkward date and need something to talk about.

The third thing we look for is definitely the rarest. There’s a kind of article that elicits a strong emotional reaction, and is valuable almost for that alone. I don’t mean Katie Hopkins/Owen Jones screeds (in fact, as a general rule, opinion columns aren’t the kind of thing we look for). It’s more about being the kind of thing that is genuinely emotionally moving, which is so rare as to be really quite valuable. So recently for instance, there was an epic 31-minute testimonial sort of piece, written by a Filipino guy whose family, living in America, had their own live-in slave for decades. A really weird, and genuinely affecting piece.

It’s all about the reader

Ultimately though, it’s all very well to think about these things in abstract terms, but it’s really helpful to think of the readers as real, individual people because that’s what they are. Before we press the big green button (that puts the article onto the main page), we try to imagine that someone we know has just read it. We’d like to think that after reading, every reader should be able to say “that article was worth my time”. That breaks down into being able to say:

• “This article made me better understand something that’s going on”
• “This article taught me something genuinely new”
• “This article really changed the way I think about something”
• “This article itself was entertaining”

Cautiously, I’d probably say that the top two are a little more important to us, so if an article demonstrates them, it’s pretty much good to go.

I guess the final part of the process is actually putting together the “Reason to Read” feature that we stick on every article to provide our readers with a justification for why it’s actually worth their time. If you’re struggling to come up with that, that could be a late-stage red light.

But just before I finish, it probably is worth noting that although it might sound superficially like every curator works alone (it’s not actually just me!), that really isn’t the case. We don’t have the office space for that kind of privacy. For better or worse, we talk to each other constantly, sharing things we’ve spotted, debating whether our choices are right and generally trying to subtly undermine one another (JK). We’d hope that kind of collaboration makes us that little bit better at our jobs collectively, and stops us making too many embarrassing typos.

Anything else you want to share?

Just one final thing. While we’ve done our best to create guidelines that lead to the best content, we’re always open to improvements and would love to hear what you think. If you have any thoughts on any of this, you can email me, felix@compassnews.co.uk