AI TUTORIAL
Building a Custom AI Newspaper
Most mornings, I open five different things before I've had coffee: a news site, a weather app, box scores, my portfolio, whatever AI story broke overnight. Fifteen minutes to piece together what a newspaper used to hand me in one glance.
So I built myself one. An actual newspaper, masthead and section grids and pull quotes, made fresh whenever I ask for it, covering exactly what I care about and nothing I don't.
This is the full build. If you read our newsletter issue, you already did stage one: picking your sections and writing the standing prompt. Here's everything past that.
Decide what actually goes in your edition.
Before you write a single prompt, get specific. Vague sections produce vague output. I use these questions to nail mine down, and you should answer them for yours before you start:
Local news for which city, specifically?
Which sports teams, by name? Not "sports." Mine are the Cardinals and the Suns.
National and world news, and does it matter to you whether the sources lean any particular direction?
Weather for your city, plus anywhere else that matters (I added Flagstaff, since I have a place up there)
Markets, and specifically anything you hold or watch
Any standing topic you want a permanent eye on. Mine is AI news, since I write about it for a living
Anything that only matters on certain days. I don't need Flagstaff weather most of the week, only when I'm actually heading up there
That last one matters more than it sounds. A newspaper that shows the same seven sections every single day starts to feel like noise by week two. The best version only shows what's relevant today.
Write the content prompt.
This is the instruction that pulls your actual news. Be exact about what you want and demand real search, not a guess from memory:
"Act as my personal news editor. Using real, current web search, pull today's edition covering: [your sections, listed specifically]. For each story, give me the real headline, a two-to-three sentence summary, and a link to the actual source. Keep it tight and skimmable, not a wall of text."
Run it once before you touch the design. Be honest about what's off: too long, wrong section getting too much space, something missing. Tell the AI exactly that and have it rebuild the prompt, not just that one edition. The prompt is what you're actually building. The first output is just a test print.
Add the design.
Once the content is right, ask for the layout separately. This is where it stops looking like a bulleted list and starts looking like a newspaper:
"Now build this as an actual newspaper page: a masthead with my name and the date, a weather bar up top, section headers, and a pull quote if one of today's stories has a strong line. Use a clean, classic newspaper design, serif headlines, thin rules between sections. Make every headline a working link to its real source."
Claude will hand you back a real, styled HTML page. Open it in a browser and it looks like an actual paper. Worth knowing before you start: ChatGPT's scheduled version won't give you that. Set this up as a recurring ChatGPT task and you get clean formatted text, not a designed page. Not a flaw in either tool, just a real difference in what each one automates right now. If design matters to you, build it in Claude. If you just want the content on a schedule and don't care about layout, ChatGPT's scheduled tasks handle that fine.
Make every headline clickable.
If your first version doesn't already link out, ask for it directly:
"Make every headline a live link to its real source article. Links should open in a new tab so I don't lose my page."
This is the one upgrade that makes it better than an actual newspaper. Skim-and-decide format of print, plus the ability to go deeper on exactly the story you care about.
Decide how you want it delivered.
You can rebuild it by hand each morning, just by asking again. Or, depending on your tool, set it up as a recurring task that runs on its own. Both ChatGPT and Claude support some version of scheduled, recurring prompts. Set it up once, then check after a few days whether the output still matches what you wanted. Adjust the standing prompt, not just that day's edition, whenever something feels off.
Keep refining it.
The version I'm using today isn't the version I started with. My running list for next time: specific teams beyond my main two, a stated lean, or no lean at all, for national sources, a look-ahead section for the coming week, and rules for when secondary sections like Flagstaff weather should actually show up. Your list will look different. That's the point. This isn't a tool you set up once. It's one you keep tuning until it reads like your morning, not a generic one.
Try This With AI
What it does: Builds a complete first edition of your personal newspaper in one pass, content and design together, ready to open and read.
Before you begin: Have four things ready: your city, a second city if you want separate weather for it, your sports teams by name, and any topics you want a standing eye on.
"Act as my personal newspaper editor and designer. Using real, current web search, build me a full newspaper edition with these sections: My city: [your city] Second location for weather: [a second city, if you want one] Sports teams: [your teams, by name] Topics I care about: [AI news, a hobby, anything else] Design it as an actual newspaper page: masthead with my name and today's date, a weather bar, clear section headers, a pull quote if one story has a strong line, and every headline linked to its real source, opening in a new tab. Keep summaries tight, two to three sentences each."
Customize it: Fill in the four fields with your real city, teams, and topics, then save the finished prompt in a Claude Project or ChatGPT's custom instructions so you're not retyping it every morning.
Then ask this: "Can you set this up to run automatically every morning, and tell me honestly what will and won't carry over from the design when it runs on its own?"
This week: pick your sections, write the standing prompt, and run your first edition. Fifteen minutes, and you've built the one thing that actually replaces those five browser tabs.
WHERE TO GO NEXT
More on this topic, from sources worth your time:
Would You Notice If AI Was Lying to You? Why checking your sources matters just as much when AI built the page as when it wrote the story.
OpenAI's guide to scheduled tasks The official rundown on setting a recurring prompt to run on its own. (Returned a 403 to my automated check, likely bot-blocking rather than a dead link -- worth a manual click before publishing.)
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