The 5:45
Editorial standards
How The 5:45 chooses, presents and corrects the news.
The 5:45 is a curated news digest. It does not report stories itself; it finds the ones worth your time and sends you to the publishers who did the reporting.
How stories are chosen
- We read a fixed list of publishers' RSS feeds, chosen for this beat. The list is on the About page.
- Duplicates are removed, including the same story syndicated under a reworded headline.
- What is left is ranked for relevance to this publication's subject and for recency. Nothing older than three days is eligible.
- No single publisher may fill the page: each source is capped at a few stories per edition, so the day's selection comes from a range of outlets.
- The top 5 stories are published each weekday.
Headlines go to the original
Every headline links to the publisher's own article. We show the headline, a short excerpt from the publisher's feed and, where one exists, the publisher's lead image, credited and linked to its source. Images are never copied to our servers. The original article is always the authoritative version.
Machine-written summaries
Some stories carry a short summary, an introduction and a few key takeaways, written by an AI model from the publisher's article. Each one is labeled as machine-written where it appears. The model is instructed to report only what the article says, and summaries are skipped when there is too little text to work from, but a machine can still misread, omit context or get a detail wrong. Treat a summary as a guide to whether to read the article, not a substitute for it.
Blueprint briefings
Some editions carry a Blueprint briefing: an original synthesis of the day's selected stories, written with the help of an AI model, that explains what the news means for practice. Every source a briefing draws on is linked from it, and the briefing says who developed the framework it applies.
Independence
Sponsorship never buys coverage. Advertisers have no say in which stories are chosen or how they are summarized, and every sponsored item is labeled as sponsored or advertising.
Corrections
When we get something wrong, we fix it. See Corrections for how to tell us and how corrections are shown.