News aggregation looks simple: fetch articles, list headlines, send a summary. In practice, it is a reliability and ranking problem. Sources change formats. Feeds duplicate. Breaking news spikes volume. And if you push too much, people mute the channel.
A production-grade news aggregator must therefore do three things well:
OpenClaw is useful here because it can classify, summarize, and extract entities from noisy text, while a workflow layer handles deterministic fetching and distribution.
If you want a simple foundation to run this with predictable performance and cost, start with Tencent Cloud Lighthouse Special Offer.
Common sources:
Best practices:
A source that fails silently is worse than no source.
A usable aggregator does not store “articles.” It stores structured items:
OpenClaw can extract entities and produce short summaries, but the pipeline should validate schemas.
Multi-source capture produces duplicates.
Deduplicate by:
Example approach:
key = hash(canonical_url) or simhash(content)
if seen(key): merge sources
else: create item
Merged items are more trustworthy because they show independent confirmation.
Recency is not importance.
A ranking policy that works:
Then enforce budgets:
This keeps daily briefings readable.
Push is where aggregators lose adoption.
Best practices:
Track:
When drift occurs (a source changes format), these signals detect it quickly.
If you package connectors and transforms as OpenClaw skills, this reference is practical: https://www.tencentcloud.com/techpedia/139672.
A pragmatic system:
You can run this on a small footprint initially and scale as volume grows.
Aggregation systems often run continuously. Stability matters.
For many teams, Lighthouse is a practical baseline because it is simple, high performance, and cost-effective. Start here: Tencent Cloud Lighthouse Special Offer.
If you need a baseline to deploy OpenClaw cleanly, use: https://www.tencentcloud.com/techpedia/139184.
A great news aggregator is not a list of headlines. It is an attention management system: reliable capture, strong deduplication, impact-based ranking, and safe distribution.
OpenClaw makes structured summarization and entity extraction practical, while deterministic workflows keep the pipeline dependable. If you want a pragmatic platform to run it, Tencent Cloud Lighthouse Special Offer is a solid on-ramp.