# People

A person is someone credited on a post. The author of a newsletter, the host of a podcast, or a guest on an episode.

```bash
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $SPUTNIK_TOKEN" \
  "https://sputnikintelligence.com/api/v1/people?q=tyler+cowen"
```

## What a person detail gives you

Their **appearances**: which publications they turn up on, in what role, how often, and when they last did. Plus what they have been talking about lately.

It also carries:

- `emails`: every address on record, with where it came from and, for a publication's own owner address, which publication it belongs to.
- `publications`: the Substack publications they write for, linking to the Source when we hold it.
- `social_links`: outbound links — LinkedIn, X, a personal website, and more.
- `audience`: follower counts and subscriber buckets, each with its provenance and history. See [Audience](/docs/audience).

This answers "who is this person and where do they show up".

## Roles

A person has a role on each post: author, host, or guest. The same person can host one show and guest on another. Appearances show you both, which is how you find who moves between conversations.

## We credit fewer people than exist

Feeds are inconsistent about authorship. Many carry no author, or carry the publication's name in the author field. Podcast guests are only knowable from the transcript. We record a person when we are confident and stay quiet when we are not.

This matters for filtering. There is no person filter on search, because it would hide most of the answer. A keyword search for the name finds more.

```bash
# Everything mentioning her, which is usually what you want
/api/v1/posts/search?q=%22Jane+Smith%22

# Only the posts we have credited her on
/api/v1/posts?person=<slug>
```

Browsing by person works, because it reads the credits directly. It gives you the posts we know she is on.

## Duplicates

Someone who publishes under two spellings, or as both "J. Smith" and "Jane Smith", can end up as two records. We merge these continuously. A corpus this size always has some in flight. If you find a pair that matters to you, tell us and we will merge them.