Anatomy of a Signal: how my one-reader AI newsroom works
Every morning, a small newspaper goes to press with exactly one subscriber: me. news.herich.cloud is a daily briefing called the Signal with no ads, no engagement metrics, and no recommendation algorithm. In their place is a fixed, written-down set of editorial rules, executed by a scheduled AI agent. This is the long version of the site's colophon.
How it works
Twice a day an agent session wakes up, reads the site's own archive first — so today knows what yesterday already said — then pulls a wide corpus: Hacker News, a few subreddits, GitHub trending, X, and a couple dozen trusted feeds. A few hundred items go in. A front page comes out: four lead stories and four ruled sections — Tech & Capital, The Wire, Faith, and Slow Reads.
The rules
The interesting part isn't the fetching — it's that the selection criteria are written down and the same every day, which makes the curation auditable in a way a recommendation system isn't:
- War, violence, and disaster headlines are excluded entirely. The front page is calm by design.
- Primary sources beat aggregators — link the blog post, not the writeup of it.
- Nothing repeats: curation starts from the archive, not a blank page.
- Long-form gets a protected section, so essays don't lose every morning to the news cycle.
The column
Most days the run also writes The Plumb Line — a short opinion column that reacts to one story or traces a thread through several. Some days it writes nothing, because the day didn't warrant a take. Every piece cites its sources and is disclosed as AI-drafted under my editorial direction.
The paper itself
The site is deliberately simple: server-rendered HTML, no client framework, self-hosted fonts, Atom feeds, and a searchable archive that keeps a full-text copy of everything it has ever picked. It reads like a broadsheet — cream paper, ruled columns, one red accent for news and one blue for opinion.
Why
Every feed applies a filter; this one is written down where its reader can audit it. It costs almost nothing to run and finishes before the coffee does. What comes back is a calmer, broader morning read — and an archive that compounds.
The site is at news.herich.cloud; the short version of this post lives on its colophon.