# How to Automate Your News Consumption for a Saner, Streamlined News Diet - Canonical: https://33rdsquare.com/how-to-automate-your-news-consumption-for-a-saner-streamlined-news-diet/ - Published: 2024-09-21 - Author: Kara Masterson - Categories: [Technology](https://33rdsquare.com/category/tech/) --- These days, the firehose of news articles, Twitter hot takes, push notifications, and hourly podcast updates never lets up. Regardless of your interests – whether it‘s staying on top of coronavirus updates or tracking the latest in politics, business, or pop culture – the always-on news cycle can easily overwhelm and burnout even the most plugged-in among us. And yet, staying informed feels more critical than ever as we navigate a particularly volatile stretch of current events. So how can today‘s news consumers stay up-to-speed on the topics that matter most to them, without drowning in the endless flow of takes in their feeds? Enter **news automation**: using technology, systems, and filters to effortlessly collect, organize, and even analyze the content that‘s most relevant at regular intervals – no more aimless doomscrolling required. As a data analyst and automation specialist with expertise in platforms like Zapier, IFTTT, and more, I‘ll share several proven methods for streamlining your news diet using automation. ## Leverage RSS Feeds to Follow Topics and Trusted Sources The essential building block for automating news consumption is good ol‘ **RSS**. We‘re talking about those familiar three orange letters that indicate a website or blog offers a feed of their latest content. Instead of visiting 20 different websites for your daily news, an RSS reader lets you subscribe to site feeds so you get real-time updates as they publish new articles. Modern platforms like [Feedly](https://feedly.com/) and [NewsBlur](https://newsblur.com/) provide slick interfaces built around following and reading feeds. They also offer powerful filtering based on topics, keywords, and publishers to pinpoint just the types of content you‘re looking for. For example, I follow curated feeds on Feedly around topics like big data, automation, media industry news, information security, and long-form journalism. I‘ve also subscribed to publisher feeds from news outlets and individual journalists I enjoy reading regularly. This way, opening my Feedly app or visiting the NewsBlur web dashboard gives me a chronological, easily skimmable breakdown of all the latest stories matching my interests. No more manually reloading sites to check for updates or getting distracted down random clickholes. Feedly and NewsBlur also let you organize content with tags and highlights for revisiting key stories later. You can even email articles to read on your Kindle or Instapaper queue. For frequent travelers or commuters, these RSS apps offer offline syncing across devices too. If you prefer sticking with individual sites and blogs instead of a centralized hub like Feedly, browser extensions like [RSS Feed Reader](https://rssfeedreader.com/) provide at-a-glance notifications whenever any of your subscribed feeds publish new posts so you never miss fresh stories. ## Funnel Handpicked Articles into Evernote, Pocket, and More Okay, RSS gives you an automated stream of news stories matching your preferences. But what if you stumble onto a compelling article or crucial breaking update outside of those feeds that you still want to remember to read later? That‘s where read-it-later apps and browser extensions shine. Services like [Pocket](https://getpocket.com/) and [Raindrop.io](https://raindrop.io/) are purpose-built to act like an external reading list. You can save links with a single click for viewing anytime offline across devices. But did you know these read-it-later apps integrate seamlessly with automation tools like [IFTTT](https://ifttt.com/) and [Zapier](https://zapier.com/)? You can instantly build [Zaps and Applets](https://zapier.com/apps/ifttt/integrations) to funnel noteworthy articles into your service of choice automatically. ![Diagram of Zapier automation for saving web pages to Pocket](https://i.imgur.com/stqx3Q9.png) For example, the pre-made Zap above watches for new web pages matching keyword searches or from specified sites and immediately saves them to your Pocket account. Set it and forget it – no more messy browser bookmark procedures interrupting your workflow. Pocket and Raindrop aren‘t your only saving destination options either – [Evernote](https://evernote.com/), [Dropbox Paper](https://www.dropbox.com/paper), and even Google Docs make for handy self-populating reading list repositories using similar automation recipes. For even more control, you can specify filters that route articles from different sites or topics into designated folders or notebooks automatically. Matching automation rules to your existing note-taking system helps keep saved articles neatly organized. ## Curate Daily or Weekly Newsletters Personalized to Your Needs Now that you have a robust RSS workflow supplying a filtered feed of headlines in your topics of interest, plus seamless saving of noteworthy stories from around the web, what about a quick digest or briefing to scan during your morning routine? Automation comes to the rescue once again, letting you generate richly formatted, personalized newsletters on a schedule. For example, the IFTTT Applet below emails a digest of top posts from your favorite subreddits daily, weekly, or at whatever cadence suits your needs: ![IFTTT Applet for emailing a Reddit digest](https://i.imgur.com/Ye3NUAd.png) Meanwhile, [Zapier‘s Email Digest Zap](https://zapier.com/apps/email-digest/integrations) lets you pull in updates from virtually any web feed or API into slick, shareable newsletters. Beyond RSS, that means curating social media posts, podcast episodes, YouTube videos, weather reports – you name it – automatically based on triggers you configure. For instance, if there‘s a big election coming up, you could easily build a dedicated Zap that emails you a customized briefing each morning compiling the latest polling numbers, candidate statements, related thinkpieces, and voter turnout metrics from key outlets. ![Mockup of an Automated Election News Email Digest](https://i.imgur.com/2EM7R9U.png) _Tailor digest emails around specific interests like an upcoming election_ The result? A lean yet info-packed newsletter delivered precisely when you want it, no subscription required. You won‘t miss crucial updates, but also won‘t waste time and attention streaming the full social firehose either. ## Tap Automation for Smarter News Analysis We‘ve covered how services like IFTTT and Zapier help automatically collect, filter, save, and summarize news and content to match your interests. But what about making sense of all that information? Though still an emerging technology, [**machine learning algorithms**](https://www.forbes.com/sites/robtoews/2020/04/27/could-machine-learning-technology-make-news-better/?sh=3c0bc87f6e1f) are starting to demonstrate new ways to automatically analyze news reports and raw data: - **Sentiment analysis** scans article text and headlines for positive, negative, or neutral emotional leaning to detect shifts in tone. - **Entity recognition** identifies people, organizations, locations, brands, products, dates, and more mentioned across your news sources. - **Topic clustering** groups related articles using semantic analysis instead of just keywords. This allows discovering meta-narratives and insights that cut across beats and outlets. - **Bias detection** flags potential partisan skewing in coverage by comparing language used across the political spectrum. - **Geotagging** tracks geographical locales referenced in updates to reveal global connections. Forward-thinking platforms are beginning to integrate these smart machine learning modules into their news aggregation UIs for more intuitive discovery. For example, [**Seen Media**](https://seenmediagroup.com/) structures articles using interactive relationship graphs instead of traditional timelines. Users can toggle views by people, places, topics, and publishers to reveal key narratives. Other services like [**Spacy**](https://spacy.io/) and [**Aylien**](https://aylien.com/) offer developer APIs allowing builders to embed intelligent language models however they choose. As these algorithms grow more robust in handling knowledge instead of just raw text, expect to see automation playing an even bigger role helping derive insights from across news sources. That means less effort required making sense of the firehose on your own. ## Putting It All Together: Build a Personalized News Command Center If managing an array of RSS readers, automation tools, apps for saving articles, intelligent analysis engines, and more seems overwhelming in itself, don‘t worry – it doesn‘t have to be. With so many options for streaming, filtering, saving, and making sense of news, the key is identifying your personal preferences and needs rather than adopting every shiny object. Here‘s a simple 4 step process to incrementally build your own streamlined yet powerful automated news consumption system: **1. List your core interests and trusted outlets.** What topics and publications do you care most about following regularly? Compose an intentional list rather than defaulting to all incoming headlines. **2. Select an RSS platform for following feeds.** Choose Feedly, NewsBlur, RSS Feed Reader or another aggregator based on features meeting your use case like organizing methods, reading interfaces etc. Import your desired feeds. **3. Set up a read-it-later tool and automation.** Pocket, Raindrop, Evernote, or similar paired with IFTTT or Zapier fills the gap when you encounter worthwhile articles outside your feeds. **4. Configure email digest automation.** Use Email Digest, IFTTT, or comparable to schedule periodic newsletters around topics not covered by feeds pulling in social posts, podcasts etc. Add or remove components over time until you‘ve tuned the perfect personalized news dashboard delivering the updates you want at sustainable volumes and intervals via automation. The lines between work and life continue blurring as remote work booms. For knowledge workers especially, staying updated across your role‘s landscape feels less like an option and more a constant obligation. Without intention and balance, relentless headline pings will burn you out quicker than ever. Hopefully the automation strategies and examples I‘ve shared provide some fresh ideas easing the pain – or better yet, make keeping up with the news downright delightful again. What tips do you have for making following current events feel more manageable? I‘d love to hear other methods or use cases I should cover related to news consumption automation. Leave your suggestions in the comments below! --- Source: [How to Automate Your News Consumption for a Saner, Streamlined News Diet](https://33rdsquare.com/how-to-automate-your-news-consumption-for-a-saner-streamlined-news-diet/)