Morning Local Brief

For

Editors at mid-sized local newspapers

Solves

Local newsrooms produce valuable stories that go unread because audiences lack time and prefer video.

Delivers

Personalised morning video briefings delivered via app or email

Built in

about 5 weeks of creation time, MVP in 6 days

Investment

$10,000 for the MVP, $40,500 for the full product

Run it

Inside your business, or as part of your offer to clients

For editors at mid-sized local newspapers, turn daily article feeds and columnist voices into personalised morning video briefings.

1. Ingest articles from CMS feeds.
2. Score stories against reader interests.
3. Generate narration scripts with key quotes.
4. Create or pull relevant imagery.
5. Compile video with voice clone.
6. Schedule and deliver to subscribers.

What goes in, what comes out

The workflow

1. In
   Start with

   Daily article feeds, columnist voice samples, reader preference data

2. 1

   Pull digital edition

3. 2

   Score articles

4. 3

   Select top stories

5. 4

   Generate scripts

6. 5

   Produce visuals and narration

7. 6

   Compile video

8. 7

   Deliver to subscribers

9. Out
   Finish with

   Personalised morning video briefings delivered via app or email

AI does the heavy lifting, people stay in charge

AI reads articles, extracts key quotes, generates scripts, creates or selects imagery, and synthesises narration using a consented voice clone. A human editor reviews each video for factual accuracy, tone, and pronunciation before delivery.

What your team sees

Key screens: Article intake, story selection, script editor, video preview, delivery dashboard. Use a queue of ingested articles with metadata, a scoring panel for topic match, a script editor with narration preview, a video preview with generated visuals and voice, and a dashboard showing delivery status and viewer engagement. In this product, the first view is article intake, followed by story selection, script editor, video preview, and delivery dashboard.

Accounts and administration

Editor accounts, article ingestion logs, script versions, video approval states, delivery records, subscriber preferences, and audit trail for all generated content.

Integrations and data access

Newspaper CMS (e.g., WordPress), email delivery (e.g., SendGrid), video hosting (e.g., YouTube), and subscriber management (e.g., Stripe).

We build with our own AI software development factory, so most implementations take days to a few weeks of creation time, not months. You see working software at every step, and exact timing depends on availability.

1. 1

   Scoping call

   Day 1

   Thirty minutes on your process, your data and how you want to run it: for your own team, or for your clients. You get a fixed scope and price for the MVP.

2. 2

   MVP

   6 days

   One buyer segment, one recurring use case. Manual review in the loop. Built by our AI software factory.

3. 3

   Paid pilot

   7 days

   Accounts, roles, review states, audit trail and the first integration, hardened for two to three paying pilot customers.

4. 4

   Full product

   2 weeks

   Self-serve onboarding, billing, monitoring and the wider integration set.

5. 5

   Run and improve

   Monthly

   We host, monitor and improve it for a fixed monthly fee, or hand it over to your team. How the retainer works.

Why we start with an MVP

An MVP, or minimum viable product, is the smallest version that your users can actually work with. It is not a cheap version of the full solution. It is a test, built to answer the questions that decide whether the rest is worth building.

1. Pick the riskiest assumption. Here: will editors at mid-sized local newspapers use it to solve "local newsrooms produce valuable stories that go unread because audiences lack time and prefer video"?
2. Build only what tests it. One team, one use case, a few core modules. People do the rest by hand for now.
3. Run a paid pilot. Paid pilot with one mid-sized newspaper: measure subscriber engagement (video views, time watched) against baseline text readership.
4. Measure, then decide. Track daily video views per subscriber and subscriber retention rate after 30 days. Then expand, change course or stop, with evidence instead of opinions.

MVP scope for this solution. Single-paper pilot: ingest one newspaper's daily output, use a generic narrator, produce a single 3-minute video covering top 5 stories, deliver via private YouTube link at 7 a.m. Manual review of each video before sending.

After the MVP. Automate personalisation based on reader topics, add voice cloning with columnist consent, integrate with newspaper apps, and scale to multiple publications with white-label licensing.

What the build depends on. Access to article feeds, consent for voice cloning, reliable AI video generation API, and a delivery mechanism for videos.

A planning range to start the conversation, not a quote. You pay per phase, so you can stop after the MVP.

Running costs per month

A rough indication of monthly hosting and AI model costs once it is live, not tested. Real costs depend on usage, file sizes and the models chosen.

Your brand, or this one

Run it under your own brand, or start from this concept style.

Selling it to your own clients: the go-to-market playbook

Pricing to test

Test $5/month per reader subscription and $2 per subscriber per month for white-label licensing to newspaper chains.

Message to test

Your local paper, read to you every morning in a personal video.

Where to find buyers

Newspaper industry conferences, digital publishing forums, and direct outreach to local newspaper editors.

Lead magnet

A free sample video briefing generated from a newspaper's recent articles.

The first 30 days

1. Week 1: Build article ingestion and scoring.
2. Week 2: Develop script generation and video compilation.
3. Week 3: Set up delivery and manual review workflow.
4. Week 4: Run pilot with one newspaper and collect feedback.

Paid pilot

Paid pilot with one mid-sized newspaper: measure subscriber engagement (video views, time watched) against baseline text readership. Decision: if video briefings increase daily active readers by 20%, proceed to multi-paper rollout.

Success metrics

Daily video views per subscriber and subscriber retention rate after 30 days.

Retention and expansion

Recurring daily videos keep subscribers engaged; add personalisation and columnist voice to increase loyalty and reduce churn.

Why clients would pick it

Accumulated reader preference data and proprietary voice cloning licences create switching costs; each paper's unique voice and story mix become harder to replicate over time.

Alternatives and positioning

Text newsletters, generic news apps, and broadcast news; this differs by offering a personalised, voice-narrated video that feels local and trusted.

Main delivery costs

AI video generation, voice cloning licensing, cloud storage, and editorial review time.

Limit voice cloning to consented columnists, require human review of all videos, restrict personalisation to explicit preferences, and ensure no content is published without editorial approval. Must not generate videos without human sign-off.