Editorial Standards — AI Weekly

The newsroom rules that make an auto-generated video trustworthy. These are gates, not suggestions: scripts/news_fetch.py enforces the mechanical ones and refuses to emit a file that violates them.

1. Non-negotiable: verifiability

Every item on screen must be traceable to a real article a viewer can open.

Field	Rule	Why
`url`	Required, absolute `http(s)`, live	The claim "来源可验证" is the core promise
`publisher`	Named outlet or company, never "网络"	Attribution must be specific
`date`	ISO `YYYY-MM-DD`, inside the window	Prevents stale/fabricated news
`source_tier`	Classified per §3	Signals how much weight the story carries

Never invent a headline, a number, a date, or a URL. If a fact cannot be found in a retrieved source, drop the story — do not "fill in" a plausible value.

2. The date window

Default window = the 7 days ending today. Get it deterministically:

python3 scripts/news_fetch.py window --days 7
# {"start": "2026-10-06", "end": "2026-10-12", "days": 7}

For a scheduled job this must be computed at run time, never hardcoded, or the video will slowly drift into presenting last month's news as "this week".

Edge cases:

Monday run: the window is thin early in the day. Either widen to --days 8 or accept fewer items (3–4 is valid; the template re-balances timing).
Holiday / low-news week: prefer fewer, higher-impact items over padding.

3. Source tiers

Classify each item; this drives selection when there are more candidates than slots.

Tier	Examples	Typical use
通讯社/主流媒体	Reuters, FT, Bloomberg, 新华社	Breaking news, financing, deals
厂商官方	openai.com, blog.cloudflare.com, microsoft.com	Model/feature launches (use as primary for specs & pricing)
监管/政府	白宫, EU Commission, 工信部	Policy, investigations, bans
权威媒体	The Verge, TechCrunch, 财新, 36氪	Analysis, context, regional coverage

Selection rules

Prefer tier 1–2 for anything with a number in it (funding, benchmarks, pricing).
Cross-check any extraordinary claim (a cancelled flagship launch, a record valuation) against two independent outlets before using it.
Prefer primary sources for specs: model names, prices, and dates should come from the vendor's own announcement, not from a summarizing article.

4. Headline craft

The headline is the product. Constraints enforced by the validator:

Visual width ≤ 92 units (CJK glyphs count 2). At 64px in a 1040px column this wraps to at most 2 lines without colliding with the emoji column.
Structure: <主体> + <动作> + <核心数字/实体> — lead with who, land on the thing the viewer will remember.
1–3 highlighted keywords wrapped in **double asterisks**. Choose words that carry meaning on their own: a figure, a product name, a company.
No clickbait: state the fact; do not inflate stakes with "震撼" or "炸裂".

Good: Anthropic 获 **600 亿美元** 芯片融资，华尔街银团豪赌算力 Bad: 太夸张了！**600 亿美元** 砸向芯片，AI 彻底疯了

Emoji selection

One emoji per item, semantically bound to the topic (🚀 funding/momentum, 🛡️ safety/policy, 🧠 models, 🌐 infrastructure/open-source, 🛒 consumer/retail, ⚖️ regulation, 🔬 research). Avoid purely decorative emoji; if a topic has no good glyph, choose the nearest semantic match rather than reusing ❓/✨.

5. Summary line

One sentence, ≤ 60 CJK units, that adds information the headline omits — typically the mechanism, the number's meaning, or the counter-reaction.

Headline says what; summary says so what / how.
Never restate the headline in different words.

6. Quantity

Template default: 5 items = exactly 20s.
3–4 items are valid; the outro stretches to absorb the slack.
8 is the hard cap — beyond that, per-item dwell drops below 2.5s and readability collapses. If more than 8 strong stories exist, rank and cut.

Ranking heuristic (when over-subscribed)

Score each candidate 0–5 on: source tier, numerical substance, novelty vs. other items this week, and breadth (model / funding / policy / product / market). Take the top N ensuring category diversity — five funding stories is a worse video than one story from each of five categories.

7. Honesty guardrails

Attribute contested claims: 据 X 报道 rather than stating as settled fact.
Distinguish announcement from availability; "发布" ≠ "人人可用".
If a story is a rumor, either omit it or label it clearly as such on screen.