News Aggregation

News Aggregation (Multi-Source, 3-Day Window)

Collect latest news from multiple sites and aggregators, merge similar stories into short topics, and list all main source links under each topic.

When to use

• You want one concise briefing from many outlets.
• You need deduplicated coverage (same story from multiple sites).
• You want source transparency (all original links shown).
• You want a default time window of the last 3 days unless specified otherwise.

Required tools / APIs

• No API keys required for basic RSS workflow.
• Python 3.10+

Install:

pip install feedparser python-dateutil

Sources (news sites + aggregators)

Use a mixed source list for better coverage.

News sites (RSS)

• Reuters World: https://feeds.reuters.com/Reuters/worldNews
• AP Top News: https://feeds.apnews.com/apnews/topnews
• BBC World: http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/world/rss.xml
• Al Jazeera: https://www.aljazeera.com/xml/rss/all.xml
• The Guardian World: https://www.theguardian.com/world/rss
• NPR News: https://feeds.npr.org/1001/rss.xml

Aggregators (RSS/API)

• Google News (topic feed): https://news.google.com/rss/search?q=world
• Bing News (RSS query): https://www.bing.com/news/search?q=world&format=RSS
• Hacker News (tech): https://hnrss.org/frontpage
• Reddit News (community signal): https://www.reddit.com/r/news/.rss

Skills

Node.js quick fetch + grouping starter

// npm install rss-parser
const Parser = require('rss-parser');
const parser = new Parser();

const SOURCES = {
  Reuters: 'https://feeds.reuters.com/Reuters/worldNews',
  AP: 'https://feeds.apnews.com/apnews/topnews',
  BBC: 'http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/world/rss.xml',
  'Google News': 'https://news.google.com/rss/search?q=world'
};

async function fetchRecent(days = 3) {
  const cutoff = Date.now() - days * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000;
  const all = [];

  for (const [source, url] of Object.entries(SOURCES)) {
    const feed = await parser.parseURL(url);
    for (const item of feed.items || []) {
      const ts = new Date(item.pubDate || item.isoDate || 0).getTime();
      if (!ts || ts  b.ts - a.ts);
}

// Next step: add title-similarity clustering (same idea as Python section above)

Agent prompt

Use the News Aggregation skill.

Requirements:
1) Pull news from multiple predefined sources (news sites + aggregators).
2) Default to only the last 3 days unless user asks another time range.
3) Group similar headlines into one short topic.
4) Under each topic, list all main source links (not just one source).
5) If 3+ sources cover the same event, output one topic with all those links.
6) Keep summaries short and factual; avoid adding unsupported claims.

Best practices

• Keep source diversity (wire + publisher + aggregator) to reduce bias.
• Rank grouped topics by number of independent sources.
• Include publication timestamps when possible.
• Keep the grouping threshold conservative to avoid merging unrelated stories.
• Allow custom source lists and time windows when user requests.

Troubleshooting

• Empty results: some feeds may be unavailable; retry and rotate sources.
• Too many duplicates: increase similarity threshold (e.g., 0.35 -> 0.45).
• Under-grouping: decrease threshold (e.g., 0.35 -> 0.28).
• Rate limiting: fetch feeds sequentially with small delays.

See also

• [Web Search API (Free)](./web-search-api.md)
• [Web Scraping (Chrome + DuckDuckGo)](./using-web-scraping.md)

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: besoeasy
• Source: besoeasy/open-skills
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.