How to Start a Local News Newsletter for Your Town or Village

What you'll build

National news finds you whether you want it or not. Local news is the opposite—you have to go dig for it, across a paper, a council site, three Facebook groups and a noticeboard. Most of us just stop, and miss the road closure until we're sitting in it.

A local brief flips that. You name your town once, and every morning an agent searches the web fresh and writes you the one thing worth knowing—a council decision, an opening, a closure, a change to the thing you use every day. Not a feed to scroll, an email to read, sources linked so you can go deeper when it matters.

And it works for a village as well as a city. Smaller places have thinner coverage, so on quiet days the agent widens its net to the surrounding area rather than leaving you with an empty inbox—you still wake up to something real.

Step by step: from zero to your first edition

The whole setup takes about two minutes. And every screenshot below comes straight from the real product — nothing is mocked up.

1. Step 1 Open morningmail.ai

   Head over to morningmail.ai. You'll see a sample edition and the Compose button — that's your entry point. Nothing to install; everything runs in the browser.

   

2. Step 2 Create your free account

   Sign up with your Google account. Every new account comes with a free first edition built in — so you can send yourself a real email before paying a cent.

   

3. Step 3 Create your first template

   A template is the blueprint of your email: name, delivery time, recipients, and your content sections. Click "New template" and the builder opens with a live preview right next to the editor. Everything saves automatically — there is no save button to forget.

   

4. Step 4 Add a news section

   Click "Add section +" and pick "News topic". You'll see six starters — real, editable prompts for a city, a sports club, a company, a tech topic, a professional field, and a personal interest. Pick one, and you're thirty seconds away from a working brief.

   

5. Step 5 Make it yours: Ithaca

   In the section picker, choose the "Local news" starter and type your town into the highlighted field. I used Ithaca, but a village name works exactly the same. The card rewrites its prompt live, so you can read the instruction the agent will follow before you save.

   The starter already tells the agent to skip national politics and prefer the things that change daily life—transport, housing, council decisions, openings. It names a couple of big-city papers as examples; swap those for your own local outlet ("cite the Ithaca Voice") and the brief points straight at the reporting you trust.

   

   The exact prompt your section starts with

   One Ithaca story today you'd miss anywhere else. Skip national politics. Prefer transport, housing, council decisions, openings, and city-level policy — the things that change life for someone living in Ithaca. Always cite the local outlet (e.g. Tagesspiegel, RBB) so I can read further.

6. Step 6 Set your delivery time and send yourself a test

   Almost there! Choose when the email should arrive and add your address as a recipient. Hit "Send test" — your first edition is free — and check your inbox. If something reads off, tweak the prompt and send again. Then flip the template to Active. Congratulations — you've just built your own morning brief!

   

Get more out of your brief

Name your local outlets

The starter mentions example papers—replace them with yours. One line like "prefer the Ithaca Voice and the Ithaca Times" turns a generic local digest into a reader of exactly the sources your town relies on.

Draw the boundary yourself

Towns blur into their neighbours. Tell the agent how wide to go: "Ithaca and Tompkins County, but nothing from Syracuse unless it directly affects us." On a quiet local day it leans on that boundary instead of drifting to the nearest big city.

Say what "matters" means to you

Local can mean the school board to one reader and new restaurants to another. A clause like "prioritise housing, transit and anything about the schools" tunes the brief to your life, not the town's loudest story.

Pick a cadence that fits a small place

A big city fills a daily email easily; a village might not. Every template has selectable weekdays—for a small town, a Monday-and-Thursday brief often reads denser than a daily one stretched to fill space.

Share it with your neighbours

A template can have up to 100 recipients, so your street, your parents' association or the whole village can wake up to the same local brief. You can also publish the section to the community gallery for others in your area to take over.

Good sources to anchor your brief on

The agent searches the open web every morning and cites where it read things. These are the sources I'd point it at in your prompt:

• Your local newspaper — The single most important source for a town brief—the outlet with a reporter actually at the council meeting. Name it in your prompt and the agent leans on it.
• Council and municipal sites — Agendas, minutes and decisions are published here first, long before anyone writes them up. A good local brief surfaces the decision, not just the reaction to it.
• Regional public broadcasters — Wider than your town but reliable on the stories that cross municipal lines—transport, regional policy, and weather that actually affects you.
• Community groups and noticeboards — Openings, closures, events and the small stuff that never makes the paper. The agent can weigh these as signals and follow them to a solid source.
• Local business and cultural listings — New restaurants, venues, markets and what's on—the texture of a place. Ask for these explicitly if the everyday beat matters to you as much as the news.

Frequently asked questions

Does this work for a small village, not just a city?

Yes. Smaller places have thinner coverage, so the agent is built to widen to the surrounding area on quiet days rather than send you an empty email. Name your village and, if you like, the nearest town as a fallback.

Where does the local news come from?

Public reporting—your local paper, council sites, regional broadcasters, community pages. The agent searches the web fresh each morning and links every source, so you can read the original in one click.

What does it cost?

The first edition is free, no card needed. After that each send is a few credits, priced by the AI model tier the section uses. Local news runs well on the cheapest tier, so a daily town brief stays very cheap—and credits never expire.

Can the whole neighbourhood get it?

Yes—a template supports up to 100 recipients, so a street, a parents' group or a village mailing list can all wake up to the same brief. You can also share it publicly for others nearby to take over and tweak.

Can I get it in German or another language?

Write your prompt in the language you want to read. The brief always comes back in the language of your instructions, so a German town gets German coverage. The MorningMail interface is available in English and German.