NewsAPI + Telegram: daily digests, no rabbit holes
You open your phone to “catch up,” and suddenly you’re 40 minutes deep into headlines you didn’t even care about. Worse, you still missed the one story that actually mattered for your work.
This Telegram news digest automation hits marketers and founders hard because staying informed is part of the job. Analysts and agency leads feel it too, just with different keywords and more tabs open. The outcome is simple: one clean daily message you can scan in minutes.
This workflow pulls news from two free sources, filters it with AI, summarizes the best items, and delivers your briefing to Telegram at a set time. You’ll learn what it replaces, how it flows, and what you need to run it reliably.
How This Automation Works
See how this solves the problem:
n8n Workflow Template: NewsAPI + Telegram: daily digests, no rabbit holes
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The Challenge: Staying informed without drowning in news
News doesn’t arrive neatly sorted into “important” and “noise.” It shows up as a flood: overlapping stories, recycled takes, and clickbait that looks relevant until you waste time reading it. If you track fast-moving topics like AI, crypto, or the stock market, the pace is exhausting. You either check constantly (and lose focus), or you stop checking (and get blindsided). Honestly, the worst part is the mental load of deciding what to ignore.
It adds up fast. Here’s where it breaks down in real life.
- You end up opening 10+ links just to find one useful update worth sharing with your team.
- Two sources report the same story differently, so you waste time reconciling what actually happened.
- Manual searching turns into “just one more scroll,” and your deep work window disappears.
- When you finally do find good items, summarizing them for Slack, email, or clients becomes another task you didn’t plan for.
The Fix: An AI-filtered daily digest sent to Telegram
This n8n workflow gives you a predictable briefing instead of a daily scavenger hunt. At a scheduled time (default is 6am), it fetches headlines from two separate news APIs: GNewsAPI and NewsAPI. It then maps those results into a consistent format, merges them, and hands the combined list to an AI agent. The agent’s job is to filter for relevance (based on your topic), pull out the best items, and write concise summaries you can scan quickly. Finally, the workflow sends a single Telegram message to your chosen chat, so the news comes to you, not the other way around.
The flow starts with the daily scheduler and a quick “shift date back” step so the APIs query the right time window. Next come the two HTTP requests, one for each source, followed by light cleanup (mapping) so everything matches. The AI agent summarizes, then Telegram delivers the finished digest.
What Changes: Before vs. After
| What This Eliminates | Impact You’ll See |
|---|---|
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Real-World Impact
Say you scan news twice per day from two sources (GNews + NewsAPI). If each scan takes about 15 minutes between searching, opening links, and deciding what’s relevant, that’s roughly 30 minutes daily, or about 2.5 hours a week. With this workflow, you spend maybe 5 minutes once setting your query and Telegram chat, then your daily “scan” becomes reading one message for about 3 minutes. You get the time back without going off-grid.
Requirements
- n8n instance (try n8n Cloud free)
- Self-hosting option if you prefer (Hostinger works well)
- NewsAPI for one headline source (API key required).
- GNewsAPI for a second headline source (API key required).
- Telegram Bot Token (get it from BotFather in Telegram).
Skill level: Beginner. You’ll paste API keys, pick a chat, and tweak one or two query fields.
Need help implementing this? Talk to an automation expert (free 15-minute consultation).
The Workflow Flow
A daily schedule kicks it off. The default is a “Daily 6am Scheduler,” but you can move it to lunch, late afternoon, or whenever you typically start doom-scrolling.
The workflow builds the right time window. A date step shifts the query window back so the HTTP requests pull fresh stories for the period you care about, not stale repeats.
Two news sources are fetched and normalized. n8n calls GNewsAPI and NewsAPI via HTTP Request, then “maps” the results into a consistent structure (headline, link, source, date) so they can be merged cleanly.
An AI agent filters and summarizes. The “Intelligence Orchestrator” uses a chat model to pick the most relevant items for your topic and produce short summaries that read like a briefing, not a scraped feed.
Telegram receives one digest message. The final node sends your daily briefing to a chat you control, so you stop hunting and start scanning.
You can easily modify the search queries (and even the language parameter) to match your market. See the full implementation guide below for customization options.
Step-by-Step Implementation Guide
Step 1: Configure the Schedule Trigger
Set the workflow to run automatically at 6am each day and pass control to the date adjustment node.
- Add the Daily 6am Scheduler node as your trigger.
- Confirm the trigger fires daily at 6am according to your workflow timezone (shown in workflow settings).
- Connect Daily 6am Scheduler to Shift Date Back One.
Step 2: Connect News Feeds
Adjust the date context and fetch articles from both NewsAPI and GNews in parallel.
- Configure Shift Date Back One to generate the date range you want to query (e.g., previous day).
- Shift Date Back One outputs to both Retrieve NewsAPI Feed and Fetch GNews Feed in parallel.
- In Retrieve NewsAPI Feed, set the HTTP method and URL to your NewsAPI endpoint and include your API key.
- In Fetch GNews Feed, set the HTTP method and URL to your GNews endpoint and include your API key.
Step 3: Normalize and Merge News Items
Standardize fields across both sources, then merge them into a single list for summarization.
- In Map NewsAPI Items, map the incoming fields (title, URL, summary, source, published date) into a unified schema.
- In Map GNews Items, map GNews fields into the same schema as Map NewsAPI Items.
- Connect Map NewsAPI Items and Map GNews Items into Combine Results to merge both datasets.
Step 4: Set Up AI Digest Generation
Use the AI agent to summarize and format the combined news into a daily digest.
- Connect Combine Results to Intelligence Orchestrator.
- Attach Gemini Chat Engine as the language model for Intelligence Orchestrator.
- Credential Required: Connect your Google Gemini credentials in Gemini Chat Engine (the language model for Intelligence Orchestrator).
Step 5: Configure Output/Action Nodes
Send the AI-generated digest to Telegram.
- Connect Intelligence Orchestrator to Send Telegram Update.
- Credential Required: Connect your Telegram credentials in Send Telegram Update.
- Set the target chat/channel and map the message text from the AI output.
Step 6: Test and Activate Your Workflow
Validate the full pipeline end-to-end before turning it on.
- Click Execute Workflow to run the workflow manually from Daily 6am Scheduler.
- Verify both feeds return items, that Combine Results merges them, and Intelligence Orchestrator outputs a digest.
- Confirm a message arrives in Telegram from Send Telegram Update with the formatted digest.
- Toggle the workflow to Active to run automatically at 6am daily.
Watch Out For
- NewsAPI or GNewsAPI credentials can expire or get blocked by plan limits. If the digest suddenly goes empty, check the HTTP Request node responses and your API dashboard first.
- If you’re using AI summarization via a chat model, processing times vary. Bump up the wait time (or reduce the number of articles passed to the agent) if Telegram sends before the summaries are ready.
- Default AI prompts are usually bland. Add a simple instruction like “prioritize business impact” or “focus on marketing angles” early, or you will keep rewriting the summaries by hand.
Common Questions
About 30 minutes if you already have your API keys and Telegram bot set up.
Yes. You won’t write code, but you will paste keys, choose a chat, and test one run to confirm the message format looks right.
Yes. n8n has a free self-hosted option and a free trial on n8n Cloud. Cloud plans start at $20/month for higher volume. You’ll also need to factor in chat model costs (usually a few cents per daily run) plus whatever NewsAPI and GNewsAPI charge above their free tiers.
Two options: n8n Cloud (managed, easiest setup) or self-hosting on a VPS. For self-hosting, Hostinger VPS is affordable and handles n8n well. Self-hosting gives you unlimited executions but requires basic server management.
You can change what you receive by editing the query parameters in the “Fetch GNews Feed” and “Retrieve NewsAPI Feed” HTTP Request nodes (for example, switch q=AI to q=Bitcoin or q=Tesla stock). If you want a different tone, adjust the instructions in the “Intelligence Orchestrator” AI agent so summaries match your style. Common tweaks include changing the delivery time in “Daily 6am Scheduler,” switching the language parameter, and limiting the number of items summarized so messages stay short.
Usually it’s an invalid or rotated bot token. Recreate or re-copy the token from BotFather, then update the credentials used by the “Send Telegram Update” node in n8n. If the bot can’t post to the chat, confirm you added it to the chat (or started a direct conversation) and that it has permission to send messages. Less common, but real: Telegram rate limits if you spam messages, so keep it to one digest per run.
Plenty for a daily briefing.
Often, yes, because this isn’t just “move data from A to B.” You’re merging two feeds, cleaning the structure, and running an AI agent before sending a single message, and n8n handles that kind of logic without turning into a mess of paid steps. It’s also nice that you can self-host for unlimited executions if you ever expand to multiple topics or multiple chats. Zapier or Make can still be great if you want the simplest possible setup and you’re not doing much filtering. If you’re unsure, Talk to an automation expert and we’ll help you pick the right tool for your volume and workflow.
A daily digest that’s actually readable changes how you start the day. Set it up once, then let the workflow handle the noise while you keep your attention for work that pays off.
Need Help Setting This Up?
Our automation experts can build and customize this workflow for your specific needs. Free 15-minute consultation—no commitment required.
