Best Progressive Summarization for Journalists

What Progressive Summarization actually asks of you

You don't summarize everything once; you summarize a little more each time you return to a source.

First pass: highlight. Second pass: bold the highlights. Third: a short summary at the top. Most sources never earn the second pass — that is the method working, not failing.

How journalists put it to work

1. 1

   Sources and what they said, linked

   Every contact's statements are captured as quotes with the conversation they came from. When a story breaks open, what each person said — and when — is a search, not a shoebox.

2. 2

   Story threads that accumulate

   Angle ideas capture as they occur, linked to the evidence that supports them as it arrives. The piece you write in March was mostly gathered in January.

3. 3

   Chronology on demand

   Events, statements, and documents captured with their dates reconstruct into a timeline. In reporting, the order things happened in is often the story.

The capture habit, the linking, and the retrieval are the parts tentus automates — progressive summarization without the daily upkeep.

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