Changelog
How Best Effort is changing
Best Effort is built in the open. This is every meaningful change to how the publication is collected, written, checked, designed and delivered, newest first. Small fixes are grouped with the change they belong to.
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More telecommunications news
- Editorial: Australian telecommunications is our first priority, and each edition now carries at least four telco stories whenever that many meet our quality bar. Data-centre stories are capped at four a day, down from five. The quality bar itself is unchanged.
- Editorial: Telco stories are now judged on their reach rather than their dollar value. A price change by a major carrier, an NBN wholesale decision, an outage, a regulator's penalty or a spectrum decision now ranks alongside billion-dollar data-centre deals, instead of losing out to them.
- Sources: We now read TPG Telecom's and Aussie Broadband's ASX announcements in full, from their investor centres, plus OptiComm's news. Routine filings such as director share notices are skipped.
- Sources: Nine new searches look for the stories telco news is made of: price and plan changes, NBN wholesale decisions, MVNO deals, complaints reports, spectrum and 5G, tower deals, government contracts, telco cyber incidents and carrier results.
A more consistent night editor
- Editorial: The final editorial check now judges quality only: accuracy, attribution, beat, and whether a story is real news. Deciding whether a story repeats an earlier one happens earlier, before anything is written, so genuine follow-ups (a council objection, a new decision, a new investor) are no longer dropped for resembling a past story.
- Editorial: When the editor rejects a story as off the beat, opinion, a press release with no news, or sponsored content, that decision now sticks. Previously a rejected story could be rewritten and reconsidered every morning until one run let it through.
- Editorial: A draft that's still too close to its sources' wording now gets a second rewrite instead of being dropped, so fewer good stories are lost. The limit on how closely we may follow a source is unchanged.
- Editorial: The Australian-spelling check no longer flags organisation names like "Equinix Data Center" or "Department of Defense".
- Editorial: Today's edition was regenerated with these changes, on the website and in the PDF. Links to this morning's articles still work: they lead to the rewritten article, or to the edition page if a story was dropped.
Company announcements, fewer repeats, cleaner sources
- Sources: We now read PDF announcements in full: ASX releases and company media releases that are published only as PDFs (TPG Telecom and Superloop among them). Each document is dated from its own filing date, so old filings on investor pages are never mistaken for news.
- Editorial: Before any article is written, every candidate is checked against what we published in the previous 10 days. Retellings of a story we've already run (a share-price fall recapped with analyst reaction, say) are left out; genuine developments still run as follow-ups.
- Sources: We block content farms, scraper sites, crypto news and stock forums that had been appearing in search results, including one network operating from around 50 different domains, and we no longer pick up our own articles as sources.
- Editorial: Writers no longer comment on the reporting itself ("the source says", promises to update the story), and quote punctuation is checked automatically.
- Site: Visitor statistics no longer count search-engine crawlers following share links.
Free trial, sharing and visitor statistics
- Subscriptions: New subscribers get a 14-day free trial, one per email address.
- Site: Every article and edition has share buttons for LinkedIn, X, Bluesky, email and copy link (with your phone's share sheet on mobile).
- Email: Each edition email has a "Forward it to a colleague" link and a LinkedIn share link.
- Site: We count visits on our own server, with no cookies, no tracking scripts and no IP addresses stored, so we can see what readers find useful.
Repeats, readable PDFs and a dedup test
- Editorial: No article may cite a source that a recent edition has already used, so a follow-up has to stand on new reporting. We found this gap by running a one-off Saturday edition; two of its stories repeated Friday's and were taken down.
- PDF: The edition PDF now uses a narrower text column (about 75 characters a line) at a larger size, stories flow on from one another without near-empty pages, and every page carries the date and page number.
- Sources: DatacenterDynamics' article pages block automated readers, so we now rely on their headlines and summaries plus other outlets' coverage, and never try to get around the block.
- Platform: A site that briefly asks us to slow down no longer costs an article its chance to be read in full.
Subscriptions and a new design
- Site: A new editorial design: Newsreader and Inter type, the day's briefing as bullet points, a bylined lead story, a full contents list and a dark mode that's easy to read.
- PDF and email: The PDF and the edition email match the new design. The email adapts to dark mode in mail apps that support it.
- Subscriptions: Paid subscriptions at A$5 a month (GST included). Subscribers choose where each edition goes: email with the PDF attached, Slack (one-click "Add to Slack", PDF attached), Microsoft Teams, or a webhook of their own design. Sign-in is by emailed link, with no password to remember.
- Site: Opened to search engines, with full previews when links are shared on Slack, Teams, LinkedIn and elsewhere, plus sitemaps and an RSS feed.
- Platform: Nightly backups, an operations runbook, and tools to pause publishing or take down a story at once if something is wrong.
First edition
- Editorial: The first edition of Best Effort was published, with 15 stories on Australian carriers, fibre and subsea, data centres and AI infrastructure. Each story is our own article written from all the free sources covering it, with quotes checked word for word and every source credited.
- Platform: Editions publish automatically at 05:30 Sydney time on weekdays, with the PDF posted to Slack at the same time.
Sources and pipeline
- Sources: Around 160 free industry sources: carriers' and regulators' newsrooms, data-centre and subsea operators, and free trade press. Paywalled outlets are excluded entirely and their paywalls are never bypassed. A search service fills gaps the feeds miss.
- Platform: The collection, reading and story-grouping pipeline: articles are fetched politely, their text extracted, and coverage of the same story from different outlets grouped together.