How to Build an Automated Daily News Digest from Feeds

Short answer: An automated daily news digest collects new items from a chosen set of sources through RSS feeds, merges them into one stream, removes duplicates, keeps only items that match your topics and delivers them once a day as an email, a chat message or a page. The key decisions are a short list of good sources, strict keyword filters, a fixed delivery time and a limit on how many items each digest contains.

Who a daily digest is for

A daily digest replaces the habit of opening a dozen news sites every morning. It suits anyone who needs to stay informed about a specific area without making reading news a job in itself:

• Business owners following their industry, suppliers, regulators and local news.
• Marketing and PR teams tracking coverage of their market and competitors.
• Sales teams watching news about key accounts, such as funding, hires and expansions.
• Researchers and analysts following publications in a narrow field.
• Aģentūras preparing short morning briefings for clients.

The format also works for audiences outside your company. A well-curated daily industry briefing can become a product in its own right, or a strong reason for people to join your mailing list. In that case, a light editorial layer, such as a sentence of context per item, is what turns an automated list into something people value.

The common thread is a defined topic. A digest about “everything in tech” is just another news site. A digest about “payment regulation in the EU” or “new competitors in our niche” is something no general news site provides.

Step 1: define the scope in one sentence

Before collecting sources, write down what the digest is for, in one sentence. For example: “Every weekday at 8:00, the sales team gets news about our 30 largest customers and three main competitors.” Or: “Each morning, I see new tenders and regulations that affect small solar installers in my country.”

This sentence decides everything that follows: which sources belong, which keywords to use, who receives the digest and how long it may be. When the digest starts to drift, for example because someone adds an interesting but unrelated source, the sentence is the reference that settles the question.

It also helps to define what the digest is not. If it is not meant to cover general economic news, say so, and resist the temptation to add a big news site “just in case”. Every broad source multiplies the filtering work.

Step 2: choose and prepare sources

List the sources that publish what your scope sentence describes. Mix types for balance:

• Primary sources such as company newsrooms, regulators, official statistics offices and standards bodies.
• Trade publications focused on your industry.
• Local or regional news if geography matters.
• Specialist blogs written by practitioners.

For each source, find the feed. Many sites have one, often at /feed/, /rss or linked in the page’s HTML head. Prefer category feeds over the main feed when a site covers much more than your topic. Sources without any feed, which often include company press pages and government news lists, need a feed created from the page that lists their items.

Start with ten to twenty sources. You can add more later, but a digest that is noisy from day one rarely survives the first month.

Step 3: merge, deduplicate and filter

With sources ready, combine them into one stream. Merging solves two problems at once: the delivery tool only needs to watch one feed, and duplicates can be removed in one place. When several outlets report the same press release with the same link, it should appear once.

Then filter. For a digest, keyword filters do most of the work:

• Include words for your core topics, names of companies you follow and important product or regulation names.
• Exclude words for recurring noise, such as “sponsored”, “webinar” or topics adjacent to yours that you do not want.
• Variants such as plurals, abbreviations and local-language terms if you follow sources in several languages.

Apply broad sources’ filters strictly and trusted, narrow sources’ filters loosely. A regulator’s own news page may not need any filter at all, while a general business news feed needs tight rules.

Step 4: pick a delivery channel

For email, use a daily schedule with a fixed time in the readers’ time zone, and let the platform skip days with no new items. For chat, a single message with a bulleted list of the day’s items is calmer than a separate message for each item.

Step 5: keep it short and useful

A digest competes with everything else in the reader’s morning. Short digests get read; long ones get archived unread.

• Cap the number of items, for example at ten. If there are regularly more, tighten the filters.
• Show the source name next to each headline, so readers can judge credibility at a glance.
• Use one line of summary, not full excerpts.
• Group by topic if your delivery tool allows it, such as customers, competitors and regulation.
• Send at the same time every day so it becomes part of a routine.

Step 6: review and prune monthly

Once a month, spend fifteen minutes on the digest itself. Which sources produced items people clicked? Which keywords let in noise? Were any important stories missed that you heard about elsewhere? Adjust one or two things each time. A digest that is tuned regularly gets better every month; one that is never reviewed slowly fills with noise until people stop reading.

Ask readers too. A one-line question at the bottom of the email, such as “Anything missing? Reply and tell us”, brings in useful suggestions for sources and keywords.

Example: a morning briefing for a sales team

Imagine a B2B company with a sales team of eight people and around thirty key accounts. The scope sentence reads: “Every weekday at 8:00, sales sees news about our key accounts and our three main competitors.”

The sources are the newsrooms or press pages of the thirty accounts and three competitors, plus two trade publications. About half of the company newsrooms have no RSS feed, so feeds are created from their news pages. The trade publications are broad, so their items pass only if they mention one of the account or competitor names. The company newsrooms need no filter, because everything they publish is relevant by definition.

All sources are merged into one feed with duplicates removed. An automation platform collects the day’s new items and posts one message at 8:00 into the team’s sales channel, with each item as a bullet: company name, headline, link. On a typical day the message contains a handful of items; on quiet days it is skipped.

After a month, the team notices that one trade publication generates many false matches because an account’s name is also a common word. They replace that name with a more specific phrase in the filter. The briefing takes each salesperson a minute or two to read, and account managers regularly start conversations with “I saw your announcement this morning”.

How Feeds helps with the collection part

Steps 2 and 3 are where Feeds fits. It turns any page that lists articles into an RSS feed, using the site’s own feed where one exists, and it can merge several sources into one feed. Keyword rules keep only the items with your words, or leave out items that contain others, and duplicates are removed automatically. You see a preview of the items found before anything is created, and the feed then refreshes on its own. The single feed link can go into an email platform’s RSS campaign, a chat automation or a reader. The free plan covers one website; merging several sources is part of the paid plans.

Related reading

• How to Automate Content Curation Without Losing Quality
• How to Turn an RSS Feed into an Automatic Email Newsletter
• How to Set Up Keyword Alerts Using RSS Feed Filters
• How to Send RSS Feed Updates to a Slack Channel

The bottom line

A daily digest is one of the most practical content automations: it saves every reader time every day. Define the scope in one sentence, choose a focused list of sources, merge and filter them into a single feed, deliver it at a fixed time with a cap on items, and prune it monthly. The automation handles the collecting; your scope sentence and filters keep it worth reading.

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How is a daily digest different from Google Alerts?

Alerts search the web broadly for keywords, while a feed-based digest follows sources you chose yourself. The digest gives you more control over quality and includes items that alert services may miss or delay.

Can I build a digest without any coding?

Yes. A tool that creates and merges feeds, combined with an email platform’s RSS campaign or a no-code automation platform, covers the whole workflow without code.

How many items should a daily digest include?

Most readers are comfortable with about five to ten items a day. If the digest regularly exceeds that, tighten the keyword filters or split it into topic-specific digests.

What if a key source has no RSS feed?

Create a feed from the page where the source lists its news or articles. That feed can then be merged with the other sources like any normal feed.

Should the digest be sent on weekends?

For business topics, weekday-only digests usually work better, and Monday’s issue can cover the weekend. For consumer or fast-moving topics, daily including weekends can make sense.