How to Make a Daily News Digest Automation

A news digest is one of the most popular agents people build on Zo, and for good reason: it replaces 20 minutes of scrolling with a text message that shows up before your alarm goes off. But a bad digest is just noise — 5 generic headlines you would have seen anyway. A good one is curated, formatted for your channel, and tuned to the topics that actually matter to your work.

This guide covers how to build a digest that's genuinely useful, not just a proof-of-concept.

Start with the basic version

Paste this into Zo chat and swap in your own topics:

That gets you a working digest. Tomorrow morning, you'll have an email with your briefing. Now let's make it better.

Choose your topics carefully

The biggest mistake with digests is making them too broad. "AI news" returns thousands of stories a day. "Enterprise AI deployment patterns" returns a handful of highly relevant ones. Narrow topics produce better results.

Too broad:

• "AI news" — returns everything from ChatGPT memes to research papers
• "Technology" — meaningless as a filter
• "Business news" — you'll get 500 irrelevant stories for every useful one

Better:

• "AI coding agents and developer tooling"
• "Series A and B funding rounds in climate tech"
• "Changes to Google's search algorithm"
• "New regulations affecting SaaS data privacy in the EU"

You can combine broad and narrow topics. Use 2-3 narrow topics that directly affect your work and 1 broad topic for general awareness:

Format for the channel

A news digest reads differently on SMS than in email. Optimize for where you'll actually read it.

SMS — Keep it short. You're reading on your phone, probably while walking or waiting. Five headlines with one-sentence summaries. No links (they're hard to tap from SMS). Under 500 characters total.

Email — You have more room. Include links, a brief analysis section, and formatting like headers and bullet points. This is where the full 300-word digest shines.

Telegram — The best of both worlds. Rich markdown formatting, clickable links, and no character limits. Telegram is the best channel for digests that include code snippets, longer analysis, or file attachments.

Daily vs weekly cadence

Not every topic needs a daily update. Some move slowly enough that weekly is better:

Daily makes sense for:

• Breaking news in your industry
• Market-moving events (funding rounds, product launches, regulatory changes)
• Topics where being first to know matters

Weekly makes sense for:

• Broader trends and analysis
• Academic research summaries
• Competitive intelligence (unless your competitor launches something daily)
• Topics where thoughtful curation is more valuable than speed

You can run multiple agents at different cadences:

Add a "sleeper story" section

The best digests include something unexpected. A story from a niche blog, an obscure dataset release, a regulatory filing that most people won't notice for weeks. Tell your agent to look beyond the obvious sources:

This is the section that turns your digest from "aggregated headlines" into something people would actually pay for. Mainstream news surfaces the same 10 stories everywhere. The sleeper story surfaces the 11th.

Filter the noise

After running a digest for a week, you'll notice patterns: certain types of stories are never useful, certain sources are low quality, certain topics are too crowded. Refine:

• "Stop including anything about AI-generated art — it's not relevant to my work"
• "Deprioritize stories from [specific publication] — they're too clickbaity"
• "If a story has been covered by more than 5 major outlets, skip it — I've already seen it"
• "Only include funding stories above $10M"

Each refinement makes the digest more valuable. After a few iterations, your digest surfaces things you wouldn't have found on your own, rather than things you would have stumbled on anyway.

Multi-source aggregation

Your Zo doesn't just search one place. It can aggregate across multiple source types in a single digest:

This produces a digest that would take you 30 minutes to compile manually: scanning news, checking Hacker News, skimming ArXiv, and reading newsletter emails. Your agent does it at 6am and you read the result over coffee.

Track topics over time

For ongoing stories — an acquisition, a regulatory process, a competitor's product development — ask your agent to track continuity:

The "if there's no news, say so" instruction is important. Without it, agents tend to pad quiet weeks with background information you already know. Silence is informative.

Getting started

Start with the basic version. Run it for a week. Then start refining:

After a week, you'll know what's too broad, what's missing, and which channel works best. You can also set rules that apply globally to how your Zo formats and filters content. The digest that runs a month from now will be significantly better than the one you start with today. That iteration is the point — your agent learns your preferences through the corrections you give it.