Daily News → Discord

This skill fetches the top news stories for the day and delivers them to a Discord channel via webhook as a clean, readable embed.

Configuration

These values are baked into the scheduled task but can be overridden at runtime:

Execution Steps

1. Get today's date

Run a quick bash command to get the current date in a friendly format:

date "+%A, %B %-d, %Y"

2. Search for news

Perform 2–3 targeted web searches to find today's top stories on the configured topics. Use searches like:

• "AI news today [current month year]"
• "tech news [current date]"
• "[specific topic] latest developments [month year]"

Pick the 5 most newsworthy, distinct, and recent stories. Prefer stories from the last 24–48 hours. Skip duplicate coverage of the same event.

3. Build the stories JSON

Format the 5 stories as a JSON array. Each story needs:

[
  {
    "headline": "Short, clear headline (max 80 chars)",
    "summary": "One to two sentence summary of what happened and why it matters. (max 250 chars)",
    "url": "https://source-article-url.com"
  }
]

Keep summaries punchy and informative — no filler phrases like "In a world where...".

4. Send to Discord

Call the bundled send script with the stories JSON, date, and topics:

python3 "$(dirname "$0")/scripts/send_to_discord.py" \
  --webhook "WEBHOOK_URL_HERE" \
  --date "DATE_STRING" \
  --topics "AI & Tech" \
  --stories 'STORIES_JSON_HERE'

Replace placeholders with actual values. Pass the stories JSON as a single-quoted string. If the JSON contains single quotes, use a temp file instead:

echo 'STORIES_JSON' > /tmp/stories.json
python3 scripts/send_to_discord.py --webhook "..." --date "..." --topics "..." --stories-file /tmp/stories.json

5. Confirm delivery

The script prints the HTTP status code. A 204 means success. If it fails, inspect the error output and retry once (Discord webhooks occasionally return 429 rate limits — wait 2 seconds and retry).

Discord Message Format

The message is sent as a rich embed:

📰 Daily News Digest — Monday, March 6, 2026
Today's top stories in AI & Tech

1. OpenAI Releases New Reasoning Model
   GPT-5 now available to all users with improved reasoning...
   [Read more]

2. ...
...
──────────────────────────────
OpenClaw Daily News • Powered by Claude

Customization

To change topics, edit the --topics argument in the scheduled task prompt and adjust the search queries in Step 2. Topics can be comma-separated: "AI, Finance, Science".