OpenClaw Use Case: Building a Daily Personal News Digest with AI

A developer on r/openclaw shared their practical implementation of OpenClaw for creating a daily personal news digest. After initial challenges with security and cost control (they switched to using minimax M2.7 as their main model), they've developed a working system that runs as a cronjob.

The Prompt Structure

The core of this implementation is a detailed prompt that defines:

• System Role: "You are my personal news curator. Your job is to deliver a focused, high-signal media briefing — not a summary of everything, but the 5 stories that matter most to me today."
• News Sources: RSS feeds from FD, NRC, and Volkskrant (in that priority order)
• Interest Profile: Technology & AI (especially product, policy, business), Dutch entrepreneurship & startups, Dutch tax policy & regulatory changes, Dutch & global political decisions, global economic events, and high-quality opinion pieces
• Selection Rules: Exactly 5 stories, merge duplicate coverage from multiple sources, explicitly name opposing views, deprioritize celebrity news, soft features, weather, sports, and local crime

Output Format

The prompt specifies a structured output:

**Intro:** Open with a single sentence setting the tone of today's news — not a generic greeting.

[N]. Headline — write your own, punchy and informative 📰
Sources: [Publication names, in priority order]
What happened: 1–2 sentences, plain language.
Why it matters: 1–2 sentences — the so-what, the implication, the consequence.
Differing views: (only if applicable) Note how sources frame it differently.
🔗 Article 1 title · Article 2 title

The entire briefing is written in English, even though the source publications (FD, NRC, Volkskrant) are in Dutch.

Security Considerations

The developer notes they only included sources they trust to prevent prompt injection, and this runs on a "public" agent without access to private information.

Example Output

The system produces daily briefings like this example from 6 AM:

The Iran conflict is no longer just a geopolitical flashpoint — it's becoming an economic reckoning, with energy prices, supply chains, and political coalitions all under pressure simultaneously.


Trump's Coalition Is Starting to Fracture Over the Iran War
📰 Sources: FD (primary), Volkskrant
High gasoline prices, misaligned war goals, and the feeling that "America First" is being abandoned — these tensions are now visibly cracking Trump's MAGA base. FD reports growing dissent within his own ranks. Meanwhile, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is trying to reframe the war in Iran as something between a video game and a moral crusade, according to Volkskrant — a framing that is clearly not landing.

Why it matters: The sustainability of US military posture abroad depends on domestic political support. If Trump's core coalition starts defecting on this, it changes the calculus for how long the conflict lasts — and whether the energy shock becomes a multi-year event or gets resolved faster than markets expect.
🔗 link1, link2

The developer finds this setup simple to implement, easy to extend, and eliminates the need to check multiple news apps daily.