Tutorial · Research Workflows

How to Create a Daily AI News Brief With Source Links

A short, defensible daily read built from a defined source set.

Independent Content Strategist & Product-Marketing Writer · Published May 27, 2026

Primary audience: Research, intelligence, and editorial teams
Also useful for: AI application developers
Tone: Educational
Reading time: 3 min
Published: May 27, 2026

Direct answer

Create a daily brief by fixing the topic definition and source set first, deduplicating syndicated copies before summarising, and writing one or two sentences per item with the source link attached. Rank by relevance to the stated topic rather than recency, cap the length, and archive everything that fell below the threshold so the filter can be audited.

In active development — preview and full outline below

A brief is defined by what it refuses

A feed shows everything that matched. A brief shows the few items worth a reader's attention and can explain why the rest were excluded. That explanation requires keeping the rejected list — which most implementations discard, and which is the only thing that makes the filter tunable.

Definition: one story, many items

A single announcement typically appears as the vendor's own post, two syndicated rewrites, and an aggregator stub. Deduplicate before summarising, choose the canonical copy deliberately — primary source over commentary — and link the copy you actually retrieved, not the one that ranked first.

The daily run

01Resolve the source set
A fixed list of publishers plus a small query set. Both are versioned; changes to either are dated, because a change to the source set explains a change in the brief.
02Retrieve, do not skim
Fetch the full page for every candidate. Summarising from a search snippet is how a brief states something the article does not.
03Deduplicate
Cluster by content similarity and by canonical link, then pick one copy per cluster and record the discarded URLs against it.
04Rank against the topic definition
Relevance to the stated topic, not recency. Recency is already implied by the source set's window.
05Summarise to one or two sentences
Every sentence must be supported by the retrieved text. No added context, no framing the article did not make.
06Cap, publish, archive
Cut at the length cap, publish with retrieval times, and store everything below the cut with the reason it fell short.

Illustrative outputmarkdown · 5 lines

# Daily brief — [topic]1. [One-sentence summary]. https://example.com/item (retrieved 07:02)2. [One-sentence summary]. https://example.org/item (retrieved 07:04) _4 further items archived as below-threshold._

Failure modes specific to briefs

Failure	How it shows up	Fix
One story fills the brief	Five near-identical items	Deduplicate before ranking, not after
Summary asserts more than the article	Reader clicks through and the claim is absent	Require a supporting excerpt per sentence
Topic drift	The brief slowly becomes about something adjacent	Review the topic definition monthly; date the revision
Paywalled candidate summarised from a teaser	Confident summary of an article nobody read	Mark as unretrievable and exclude, or link without summarising
Filter cannot be improved	Complaints are unactionable	Keep the rejected archive with scores

Full outline

Sections planned for this guide

01Defining the topic
- — Inclusions and explicit exclusions
- — Reviewing the definition monthly
- — Topic drift as query sets age
02Collection
- — Fixed sources plus a query set
- — Retrieval before summarisation
- — Handling paywalled candidates
03Deduplication
- — Syndication detection
- — Content similarity thresholds
- — Choosing the canonical copy
04Summarisation
- — One or two sentences, source-bound
- — Avoiding added claims
- — Consistent voice
05Ranking and delivery
- — Relevance over recency
- — Length caps
- — Archiving the rejected set

Practical takeaway

Deduplicate before summarising or one story becomes five items.
Never summarise from a snippet you did not retrieve.
A length cap forces ranking, which is where the value is.
Archive rejected candidates — that archive is how you tune the filter.