How we build the City Report newsletter

It’s a human-AI collaboration, and it provides a daily view of the top Toronto stories from across the web.

As you may have heard, Meta has banned news on Facebook and Instagram for Canadian users in preemptive response to Bill C-18, also known as the Online News Act, which would have required the company to pay for news links hosted on its platforms.

Of course, as has been pointed out in recent days, the ban hasn’t eliminated Canadians’ ability to find news on the internet. Users can go directly to news websites or apps, or sign up for those sites’ newsletters.

That said, this ban has made it harder to get a look at a broad range of publications in one spot.

For this, though, Torontonians can at least look to City Report, our brand new newsletter.

What’s City Report?

Glad you asked! City Report is a newsletter that collects both our latest content and the top Toronto stories from across the web, every weekday.

It uses ChatGPT technology to crawl a list of more than 30 RSS feeds from Toronto-focused news sites, blogs, and even Substacks. It then selects a batch of top stories — often grouping similarly themed content from multiple sites into sections — and packages them up for readers.

You can see the latest edition of City Report here.

How do we build City Report?

This is the fun part. Believe it or not, it’s all accomplished via Slack (a messaging app for business, for those unfamiliar).

First thing in the morning, we type “/generate newsletter” into a specific Slack channel, and the AI gets to work, crawling feeds and then building the newsletter.

The test newsletter pops up in Slack in under a minute, complete with a summary of the stories, a Toronto factoid from our editorial staff, and a link to our latest feature.

At that point, a Torontoverse staffer clicks through to the selected stories, and ensures they reflect the best and most interesting content about the city available at the moment.

If we don’t like the mix of stories, we can scrap the newsletter and re-generate. We will also edit the summary and section headers, and cut individual stories within a section if they feel redundant or don’t fit with other content they’ve been paired with.

Once the newsletter build is complete, we can publish, send a test email, and ship to our full subscriber list — all within Slack.

To sign up yourself and join our growing list, check out the form below.

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Code and markup by Craig Battle. ©Torontoverse, 2023