How to Build a Daily News Digest with OpenClaw
Build an automated daily news digest that searches the web for topics you care about, summarizes key articles, and delivers a concise briefing on your schedule.
最後更新: 2026-03-31
所需 Skills
總結 URL、PDF、影片和文件內容。
把自然語言轉成 cron 定時運算式。
What You'll Build
An automated news digest pipeline that:
- Searches the web for news on topics you define — AI, tech, your industry, competitors
- Filters and ranks articles by relevance and recency
- Summarizes each article into 2-3 sentence briefs with key takeaways
- Delivers a formatted digest daily via your preferred channel — terminal, Telegram, email, or Markdown file
By the end of this guide, you'll have a personalized news briefing that runs every morning before you start work.
Why Automate News Digests
Staying informed is important, but the way most people do it is broken:
- Information overload — RSS feeds, Twitter, newsletters, and Hacker News collectively surface hundreds of articles per day
- Quality variance — most articles rehash the same news with different headlines, adding noise without insight
- Time cost — manually scanning sources and reading articles takes 30-60 minutes daily
- Recency bias — you tend to read whatever shows up first, not what's most important
- Inconsistency — some days you catch everything, other days you miss major developments
An AI-powered digest searches multiple sources, deduplicates coverage, and distills each article into its core insight. You get a 5-minute read that covers what would otherwise take an hour.
Prerequisites
- OpenClaw installed and configured (Getting Started Guide)
- Tavily API key (free tier: 1,000 credits/month — 1 credit per basic search, at tavily.com)
- Node.js 18+
Step 1: Install the Required Skills
# 1. Web search for news discovery npx clawhub@latest install tavily # 2. AI summarization npx clawhub@latest install summarize # 3. Scheduled delivery npx clawhub@latest install cron
Step 2: Configure Your Topics
Define the topics you want to track. Create a configuration file:
# .openclaw/news-digest.yml
topics:
- name: "AI & Machine Learning"
queries:
- "AI news today"
- "large language model breakthroughs"
- "AI regulation updates"
max_articles: 5
- name: "Developer Tools"
queries:
- "developer tools news"
- "new programming frameworks 2026"
- "devops automation news"
max_articles: 3
- name: "Startup & Tech Business"
queries:
- "tech startup funding news"
- "SaaS industry trends"
max_articles: 3
Customizing Topics
- Be specific — "AI regulation EU 2026" works better than "AI news"
- Use multiple queries per topic for broader coverage
- Set article limits to keep the digest concise
- Add competitor names if you want competitive intelligence
Step 3: Set Up the Schedule
# Daily at 7:30 AM — ready before your workday starts clawhub run cron --schedule "30 7 * * *" --task "news-digest" # Weekdays only at 8:00 AM clawhub run cron --schedule "0 8 * * 1-5" --task "news-digest"
Step 4: Run Your First Digest
Test it manually:
clawhub run tavily --topics ".openclaw/news-digest.yml" --summarize
Example output (fictional articles shown for illustration purposes):
=== Daily News Digest === Date: Monday, March 31, 2026 ## AI & Machine Learning (5 articles) 1. **OpenAI Releases GPT-5 Turbo with 2M Context Window** Source: TechCrunch | 6 hours ago OpenAI announced GPT-5 Turbo with a 2M token context window and 30% lower latency. Early benchmarks show significant improvement on long-document reasoning tasks. Pricing starts at $5/M input tokens. 2. **EU AI Act Enforcement Begins for High-Risk Systems** Source: Reuters | 12 hours ago The EU AI Act's high-risk provisions took effect today, requiring companies to register AI systems used in hiring, credit scoring, and law enforcement. Non-compliance penalties reach 6% of global revenue. 3. **Google DeepMind Achieves New SOTA on Mathematical Reasoning** Source: arXiv Blog | 1 day ago DeepMind's AlphaProof-2 solved 78% of IMO 2026 problems, up from 65% last year. The system combines formal verification with chain-of-thought reasoning in a novel architecture. 4. **Anthropic Raises $5B Series D at $90B Valuation** Source: Bloomberg | 8 hours ago Anthropic closed a $5B round led by Spark Capital and Google. Funds will be used to scale Claude infrastructure and expand enterprise partnerships. 5. **Open-Source LLM Llama 4 Matches GPT-4 on Coding Benchmarks** Source: The Verge | 1 day ago Meta's Llama 4 achieves parity with GPT-4 on HumanEval and MBPP benchmarks. Available under a permissive license, it's expected to accelerate self-hosted AI adoption. --- ## Developer Tools (3 articles) 1. **Bun 2.0 Released with Native Windows Support** Source: Bun Blog | 4 hours ago Bun 2.0 adds full Windows support, a built-in test runner with coverage, and 40% faster npm install. Migration from Node.js is now seamless for most projects. 2. **Vercel Launches Edge Middleware v3 with Streaming** Source: Vercel Blog | 1 day ago Edge Middleware v3 supports streaming responses and WebSocket passthrough. Latency for middleware-heavy applications drops by up to 60% in benchmarks. 3. **GitHub Copilot Workspace Now Generally Available** Source: GitHub Blog | 2 days ago GitHub's AI-powered development environment is now GA. It combines issue analysis, code generation, and PR creation in a single workflow. Free for open-source projects. --- ## Startup & Tech Business (3 articles) [...]
Step 5: Choose Your Delivery Channel
Terminal Output (Default)
The digest prints to your terminal — great for quick checks.
Markdown File
Save to a file for archiving:
delivery:
format: markdown
output: "~/digests/{{date}}-news.md"
Telegram
Combine with the Telegram skill to receive digests in Telegram:
delivery: channel: telegram chat_id: your_chat_id
Combine with the Gmail skill:
delivery:
channel: email
to: "you@example.com"
subject: "Daily News Digest — {{date}}"
Advanced: Source Diversification
Adding RSS Feeds
For sources that Tavily might miss, add specific RSS feeds:
rss_feeds:
- url: "https://news.ycombinator.com/rss"
name: "Hacker News"
max_items: 10
- url: "https://feeds.feedburner.com/TechCrunch"
name: "TechCrunch"
max_items: 5
Deduplication
When multiple sources cover the same story, the summarizer automatically detects duplicates and merges them into a single entry with multiple source citations. This keeps your digest clean without manual intervention.
Sentiment and Trend Analysis
Ask the summarizer to tag articles with sentiment and identify trends:
Summarize today's news and add: - Sentiment tag (positive/negative/neutral) for each article - A "Trends" section at the end listing recurring themes across articles
Troubleshooting
Tavily returns old or irrelevant articles
- Add date filters to your queries: append "2026" or "this week" to search terms
- Use the
recencyparameter to prioritize recent content - Narrow your queries — broad terms like "AI" return too many generic results
Digest is too long
- Reduce
max_articlesper topic - Remove low-priority topics
- Switch to "headline only" format for less important categories
Digest is too generic
- Use more specific queries
- Add industry-specific terms
- Include competitor names or product names for targeted coverage
Cron job not firing
- Verify the schedule:
clawhub list --cron - Check system time and timezone
- Ensure OpenClaw daemon is running
常見問題
The main cost is Tavily API usage. A typical digest with 3 topics and 5 queries each uses about 15 basic searches per day (15 credits) — roughly 450 credits/month, well within the free tier's 1,000-credit limit. AI summarization costs depend on your provider, but a full digest typically costs $0.01-0.03 per run. Total monthly cost for daily digests: under $1.
Yes. Swap `tavily` for `exa` (semantic search) or `brave-search`. The rest of the workflow stays the same. Some users prefer Exa for technical topics because it uses semantic matching rather than keyword search.
Yes. Configure the delivery to post to a shared Telegram group, Slack channel, or email distribution list. The digest format works well as a team briefing that everyone reads in the morning.
You can manage topics through natural language: tell OpenClaw to "add a topic for cybersecurity news" or "remove the startup section from my digest." The skill updates the configuration file automatically.
Yes. Use `0 9 * * *` (every day) instead of `0 9 * * 1-5` (weekdays only) in your cron schedule. You can also configure different topic sets for weekends — lighter on work topics, heavier on personal interests.
The digest itself doesn't learn from your reading habits automatically. However, you can improve it manually by refining your topic queries based on what you find useful. Over time, your configuration becomes increasingly tuned to your interests.