2026-01-26 - Create Pitches
Background
Day of the year is 26.
Mega Category for today is Self Optimization. Definition: Advice on productivity, mental health, diet, relationships, and financial success. The functional arm of non-fiction, including ‘Atomic Habits’-style literature as well as more clinical mental health workbooks and ‘anti-hustle’ memoirs. Has migrated heavily to audio formats, as consumers prefer to ‘optimize’ their time by listening to advice on improvement while performing other tasks. Do all you can to avoid these sorts of complaints: Users complain about the repetitive, repackaged nature of self-help advice, with the same concepts recycled endlessly with new branding. There’s frustration with toxic positivity, the implication that personal effort can solve systemic problems, and the ‘hustle culture’ that led to widespread burnout. Many criticize the lack of scientific rigor, the proliferation of unqualified ‘gurus,’ and the way mental health struggles are commodified. The genre is also faulted for creating shame cycles where failure to improve becomes another problem to fix. Note:
The Story Angle for today is Forensics Description: Frames the category as a mystery to be solved. This applies the pacing and structure of a detective story or true crime investigation to non-crime topics (e.g., tracking down the origin of a lost song, or finding the ‘patient zero’ of a trend). The narrative drive comes from the hunt for information. Do all you can to avoid these sorts of complaints: Manufacturing false suspense or ‘cliffhangers’ where there are none. Avoids anti-climactic endings where the mystery is unresolved due to lack of reporting. Note:
The topic for today’s work is: Forensics in the field of Self Optimization
Goal
I want you to only answer this question as if I were a new user and this is my first question. Don’t look at my files or chat history.
I’ve provided a Mega Category and an Angle.
You and I are going to create a system for creating an entirely new news source, like a news magazine, newspaper, podcast, video news broadcast, etc. Actually, the actual delivery format is still in flux. Let’s refine this by saying you are helping me run a daily news-magazine engine with very strict rules. As such, I have hired you as a ruthless filter for true yet interesting signal. Your only goal is to surface fascinating, non-hyped stories that working researchers actually care about — never press releases, never industry cheerleading, never “magic thing changes everything” or “Thing I don’t like is the end of all of us” fluff.
All I want back is a markdown table in a code block that I can copy and a paragraph
The markdown table should have Theme # Theme Name Material Count [analysis period] Key New Events Sample Long-Form Angle Why Orthogonal/Balanced
Background
Success Criteria
That a random selection of any of these recommendations stands up as being worthy of publication after continued research and writing
Proposed Steps
STEP 1 – Your task - coming up with five themes
Now that we have a Mega Category and an angle, we need to researched a candidate list of themes, and we’re going to need to iterate and refine this again and again until we get a rough balance of material. This is called balancing out an editorial calendar. We’re going to need to do this every time we go through this exercise as the online information landscape is always changing. It is, as if we were setting up our news source from a completely blank slate. What we’re going to need is to make our list of themes detailed enough to be the most active and also the most orthogonal to one another. To do this
From the past 40 days only search web + X/Twitter/Online/Social Media/Technical Journals for high-quality content matching today’s exact combination. Keep only thoughtful, reasoned discourse (academic preprints, expert threads, conference talks, policy discussions, long-form essays, etc.).
QUALTIY CONSIDERATIONS
- We need to consider source material. We live in an age if information warfare, so most - perhaps an overwhelming percentage — of what you’re collecting is meant to skew the conversation. We need to filter out noise. A good place to find noise is Press Releases, submarine stories that actually are promoting something else, breakthroughs that are hyped beyond reason, and oddly enough, stories that don’t seem to have much intellectual reasoned discourse — those with either a bunch or hype or a bunch of derision. Filter that crap out as much as you can
- Themes are great, but we want to share new things, not analysis of existing things. Do each of these themes have a sufficient number of new events to say, perhaps, write a long-form magazine article about? If not, re-do the list, combining topics, making new ones, whatever it takes to get it as mutually orthogonal as possible.
From the filtered results, extract the 5 most prominent, mutually orthogonal themes that have enough fresh events and developments to each support a 3,000–5,000-word long-form magazine article.
STEP 2 Report back your candidate list
Then after a blank line comes the paragraph saying which theme you recommend as today’s lead and why. Nothing else.
Failure Indicators
STRICT FILTERS – remove ALL of the following noise:
- Press releases, company announcements, fundraising posts
- Submarine/advertorial stories
- Hype pieces that call anything “revolutionary / game-changing / AGI tomorrow”
- Pure derision or doomer rants with no reasoning
- Low-effort memes, one-liners, or rage bait
Reporting back anything but a markdown table
Input
None aside from this prompt
Output
Work Area
Log
- 2026-01-25 22:28 - Created