An automated news summary site is the closest thing to a publishing perpetual-motion machine. Every few minutes a script reads what just happened in your chosen niche, asks an AI to rewrite the news in your voice, attaches your editorial stance, and pushes a fresh post to WordPress. Do it for a week and you have a hundred posts; do it for a year and you have a thousand, with zero ongoing writing effort. AI Content Generator includes a dedicated Live News Mode that turns this from a “weekend hack” into a one-evening setup — RSS sources, dedup, summary prompt, cadence and cost guards, all configurable from a single campaign.
This tutorial walks through the entire setup end-to-end: picking the niche, choosing RSS sources (general feeds + Google News + Bing News + niche blogs), writing a summary prompt that gives the posts your voice instead of regurgitating the source, the cadence settings that keep cost predictable, the dedup window that prevents the same story being published three times in a row, and the publishing rules that keep the site SEO-clean.
By the end you’ll have a campaign producing 10–15 short news posts per day in your niche, summarised by AI, with each source credited inline, costing under $15 per month in API calls and requiring around fifteen minutes of weekly maintenance. The architecture works for any niche — WordPress news, cryptocurrency, local football, machine learning research, parenting — as long as there are RSS feeds.
What “automated news summary” actually means
“Automated” here doesn’t mean scraping someone else’s article and republishing it verbatim — that’s both a copyright violation and a Google penalty waiting to happen. It means reading the original source as a tip, then writing a brand-new short post that summarises what happened, adds your editorial framing, cites the source with a link, and earns its own place in search results because it’s actually a different artefact from the original.
The technique works at scale because, in any niche, dozens of outlets cover the same story with slightly different angles. Your automated site picks up the same news, but in your voice and with your specific angle. Readers who already follow the original sources don’t gain anything by reading your version — but readers who don’t will find your site through search and stay because your editorial frame fits their taste better than the original outlet’s.
Step 1 — Pick the niche and write it down
The single best predictor of an automated news site’s long-term success is the precision of its niche. “Tech news” is too broad — you’ll compete with Google itself. “WordPress news” is workable. “WordPress security news, with hands-on commentary for agency owners” is excellent. The more specific, the easier it is to find unsaturated keyword space and the easier it is to give your AI a useful editorial voice instruction.
Write down your niche in one sentence and keep it open on a sticky note while you configure the rest of the campaign. Every later decision (which RSS feeds, what tone, what to skip, what to highlight) should pass the test “does this fit the one-sentence niche?”.
Step 2 — Open Live News Mode on a campaign
Create a new campaign in AI Content Generator → Campaigns → Add New. Name it after the niche (“WordPress news daily”). Scroll to the panel titled Live News Mode and switch the toggle ON. The panel expands into the full configuration: RSS sources table, niche topic, output language, summary prompt, cadence and dedup controls, plus a “expected output” panel that previews cost and volume.
Step 3 — Add the right RSS sources
Three categories of sources work best in combination. Niche-specific feeds: the top 3–6 blogs/outlets in your space (for WordPress that’s WP Tavern, Torque, Kinsta blog, WP Engine blog, etc.). Google News RSS: use the URL pattern https://news.google.com/rss/search?q=YOUR+QUERY&hl=en&gl=US with your niche keyword as the query. Bing News RSS: https://www.bing.com/news/search?q=YOUR+QUERY&format=rss for redundancy and slightly different story selection.
Five to eight sources is the sweet spot. Below that you starve the queue; above that you waste dedup effort. The RSS sources table shows per-feed metrics: items per 24 hours, last successful fetch, an indicator dot (green = healthy, red = the feed broke). Use the metrics to drop feeds that haven’t published anything new in two weeks.
Step 4 — Write the summary prompt
The summary prompt is the most important field in the entire campaign. It controls how the AI rewrites each news item. A starting template that produces well-structured, SEO-friendly summaries:
Summarise the news item "{item.title}" (source: {item.source_domain}, original link: {item.url}).
Structure:
- Lead with the news itself in one paragraph (who/what/when).
- Expand with 2-3 paragraphs of context: why it matters, what changed, what stays the same.
- End with one paragraph of editorial stance from the perspective of a {niche} reader.
Constraints:
- 400-600 words.
- Cite the source domain in the lead paragraph.
- Add an inline link to {item.url} on the phrase "according to the original report".
- Do not copy any sentence from the original verbatim.
- Never invent numbers, names or dates not present in the source.
The placeholders {item.title}, {item.source_domain}, {item.url} are populated by the plugin from each RSS entry. {niche} is the niche string you typed at step 1. The “never invent numbers” rule is the single most important guardrail: news summaries that hallucinate stats kill trust faster than any other failure mode.
Step 5 — Set cadence and cost guards
The cadence panel has three numbers that together determine volume and cost. Fetch RSS every: how often the plugin polls the feeds. 10 minutes is a sensible default — frequent enough to catch breaking news, sparse enough to be polite to the sources. Publish at most: a daily cap. 15 posts per day is plenty for most niches; raising it past 30 risks Google flagging the site as “low-value mass publisher”. Dedup window: how many days the plugin remembers previously published items. 7 days catches the common case where Bing News surfaces a story 48 hours after Google News.
Pair these with the AI provider settings. Gemini 2.0 Flash on 500-word summaries costs roughly $0.03 per article — 15 posts/day = $13.50/month. Claude Haiku or GPT-4o Mini at similar pricing. Don’t use a heavyweight model here: news summaries don’t benefit from Sonnet/Opus/4o quality, they benefit from speed and price.
Step 6 — Set the publishing rules
Three publishing rules deserve specific configuration for a news site. Always cite source domain — keep this ON. Every post should mention where the news came from in the lead paragraph; this is both ethical and an SEO signal that you’re aggregating, not stealing. Auto-set focus keyword from title — ON. The plugin extracts the dominant phrase from the title and uses it as Yoast / Rank Math focus keyphrase. Skip items mentioning competitors — usually OFF for objectivity, ON if you have specific brands you don’t want to cover.
Also enable Auto-links if you have a mapping table set up (see the Auto-links tutorial). For news content the table tends to be small but high-value: each post should link to your evergreen “what is X” pillar article whenever a related concept comes up.
Step 7 — Run a test fetch and check the first 3 posts
Save the campaign and click Run news fetch now. The plugin pulls the queued items, picks 3 to summarise as a test, runs them through the AI provider, and shows you the results before publishing. Inspect them: is the tone right? Is the source cited cleanly? Does the editorial paragraph add something? Are dates and numbers accurate against the source?
This is the moment to refine the summary prompt. The first 3 generations tell you 80% of what you need to know — what’s the model getting wrong, what’s it overdoing, where does your voice not come through. Tweak the prompt, rerun, repeat. After three iterations you’ll have a configuration that just runs.
Step 8 — Let it run and watch the first week
Set Publish at most to a conservative number for the first week (say 5 per day) and let the campaign run. Each morning open AI Content Generator → Logs and scan the previous 24 hours: how many fetched, how many deduped, how many published, how many failed. Open three random posts on the public site and read them as a normal reader would. Does anything look automated?
After a week of stable output, ramp up to your target volume. Add more RSS sources if you want broader coverage. Adjust the dedup window if you’re seeing duplicates slip through. Add a second campaign with a different niche or language if you want to scale horizontally.
Troubleshooting common issues
- The queue is always empty — your RSS sources aren’t publishing fast enough, or the niche filter is too tight. Add more sources or loosen the keyword query in Google/Bing News.
- Same story published multiple times — the dedup window is too short or the AI is rewriting the title so heavily that the dedup hash misses the match. Raise the dedup window to 14 days.
- Posts feel “samey” — your summary prompt is too rigid. Add variation hints: “vary the opening sentence structure”; “rotate between past and present tense for the lead”.
- Cost climbed past expected — somebody (probably you) raised the “publish at most” without thinking. Drop it back to a sane number.
- Google Search Console reports thin content warnings — your articles are too short for the keywords they target. Raise the word band to 600–800; also enable inline images on the cover image setting.
You’re done
That’s the entire architecture: a niche you can describe in one sentence, 5–8 RSS sources that mix niche-specific feeds with Google News and Bing News, a summary prompt that gives the AI your voice and your editorial stance, cadence settings that keep cost predictable, dedup that prevents repeats, three publishing rules that keep the site clean.
From here your news site grows on autopilot. Fifteen minutes of weekly review (drop dead feeds, refine the prompt, add a new Auto-links rule when you publish a pillar article) keeps it healthy. The output stays inside the daily cap, the cost stays inside the monthly budget, and the niche becomes yours one summary at a time. The same template can be cloned for adjacent niches without rebuilding anything — once the architecture is in your head, spinning up a second automated news site takes one evening.