Daily News Summarization Agent

An n8n workflow that delivers an AI-summarized news digest to a Discord channel every morning at 10 AM. It fetches the day’s top headlines, summarizes them with an LLM and posts the result, with no manual steps.

How it works

1. Schedule Trigger fires every day at 10 AM.
2. Fetch headlines with an HTTP request to NewsAPI.
3. Summarize all headlines with OpenAI GPT-4 (any LLM works) using a short morning-digest prompt.
4. Send to Discord through a channel webhook.

Design decisions

• A public API over RSS feeds. RSS sources were often restricted or broke without notice. NewsAPI needs only an API key and is well documented.
• Summaries, not raw headlines. A list of headlines feels fragmented; a short summary gives context.
• Discord for delivery. Webhooks are simple and reliable, and it’s where the community already is.
• No database. Nothing needs history yet, so there’s nothing to store.

Problems I hit

• 401 errors from RSS sources. Fixed by switching to NewsAPI.
• Data mapping errors. A .flatMap failed because the response shape didn’t match; mapping with .map and checking the array exists fixed it.
• Unreliable LLM output. Getting readable summaries took prompt tuning and checking which output key the summary came back under.
• Discord formatting. Getting the message format right meant referencing the AI output key correctly in the webhook body.

Run your own

Get a NewsAPI key, create a Discord webhook, paste both into the workflow nodes, run it once manually to check the channel, then switch it on.