What focuses are
A focus is a topic area you care about. When you create a focus, Editions uses a zero-shot classification model running entirely on your server to score how well each article matches that topic.
No training data is needed. No data leaves your machine. Just describe what you're interested in.
Plain-language topic descriptions
Each article is scored against every focus
How classification works
When an article is analysed, the classifier evaluates it against all your focuses and assigns a confidence score (0.0 to 1.0) for each one. Articles above a focus's minimum confidence threshold appear in that focus's feed.
The classifier uses a natural language inference model (bart-large-mnli), so the focus name acts as a natural language description. Descriptive names work better:
"AI" Broad — matches airline industry, artificial intelligence, anything "Artificial Intelligence" Better — more specific signal "Machine Learning Research" Best — narrow, well-defined topic Articles can belong to multiple focuses simultaneously. A climate technology article might appear in both "Climate" and "Technology".
Creating a focus
Source associations
When linking sources to a focus, each source has a mode:
Default mode. Uses the classifier and applies the confidence threshold.
Every article from this source gets confidence 1.0, skipping the classifier. Useful when a source is perfectly on-topic.
Each source also has a weight within the focus, which influences ranking.
Voting in focus feeds
Votes mean different things depending on context. In a focus feed, a vote is about relevance to that topic — not general article quality.
Votes propagate through semantic similarity — a few votes on climate policy articles will shift the ranking of hundreds of similar pieces you haven't even seen yet.
Global votes rate quality — focus votes rate relevance
The focus feed
Each focus has its own article feed, sorted by:
Filter by time window and read status, just like the main feed.
Tips
Start with 3-5 broad focuses
You can always get more specific later.
Use the description field
"Articles about renewable energy, electric vehicles, carbon capture, and climate policy" gives the classifier much more to work with than just "Climate".
Don't worry about overlap
Articles in multiple focuses is a feature, not a bug. A tech policy article should appear in both "Technology" and "Politics".
Re-analyse after adding focuses
Existing articles won't be classified against new focuses until they're re-analysed.