How I Built Rural News Wire, an Automated Daily Newspaper

I’ve worked as the editor of two rural newspapers in Montana: the Big Horn County News and the Big Timber Pioneer. Both of those newspapers are still around, but more than 1,800 local newspapers have closed since 2005.

What I have built in response to the downturn in the newspaper industry is Rural News Wire. Rural News Wire is a fully automated daily newspaper currently covering Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri. Every morning at 6 AM, with zero human involvement, it scrapes three local news sources for new articles. Then, it rewrites every article into an original 2-3 sentence summary using Claude. It generates an editorial column called “Ty’s Take,” picking the one or two stories that matter the most and explaining why locals should care. Finally, it publishes the full digest live to ruralnewswire.com.

It’s been running hands-free ever since, and there is a new edition every morning. The whole operation runs on a $6/month DigitalOcean server.

How it works

Ghost CMS handles the website and subscriber management. It’s open source and has Stripe integration for paid memberships baked in.

A Python scraper pulls articles from Lake Expo, Lake News Online, and KRMS Radio using a combination of RSS feeds and HTML parsing. It tracks what it’s already seen so nothing gets repeated.

The Claude API does the content work. It reads each headline and summary and then writes a fresh 2-3 sentence summary in a clear local newspaper voice. Then, it reads all the day’s headlines and writes the “Ty’s Take” editorial, picking the most important stories and offering perspective on why they matter.

A cron job runs the whole pipeline at 6 AM Central every day. The process is:

Scrape
Rewrite
Editorial
Publish

It’s all done before I even have a coffee. The total monthly cost to me is around $15. It’s comparable in price to a newspaper subscription.

Rural News Wire is live and free right now at ruralnewswire.com. Subscribe, and you’ll get the daily digest in your inbox every morning. I’m also building a paid tier for readers who want to support the work.

Ty McDuffey is the editor of Rural News Wire and a former managing editor of the Big Horn County News and Big Timber Pioneer in Montana. He holds a J.D. from UMKC School of Law.