Can AI pick the best stories for my newsletter?

The real bottleneck in a local newsletter is getting the data and finding the content. Writing is the part everyone already knows how to speed up. So I'd rather point AI at choosing what goes in than at polishing sentences.

How do I give the AI my engagement data?

Export the click report: the spreadsheet with the link to each article or event and how many people clicked it. Give that to ChatGPT. Because it can see the content behind each click, it can start learning what your readers care about.

When a guest on my podcast described this, I literally wrote it down mid-conversation. My worry had always been that a click by itself doesn't mean much. Attach the content, and it does.

How do operators use it day to day?

That same guest, who runs a local newsletter, bakes his Beehiiv subscriber and engagement insights into custom ChatGPT prompts. Each day he pastes in 20 to 40 candidate stories and asks the model which ones to include, based on what his subscribers engage with. He didn't report a measured lift, so treat it as a workflow, not a proven result.

A starting prompt:

Here is my click report from the last [number] issues, with the link for each item.
Here are today's [20-40] candidate stories with links.
Based on what my readers clicked, pick the [number] best stories for this issue,
rank them, and explain each pick in one line.

Where does selection fit in the workflow?

The stack that keeps showing up across my podcast guests: sourcing, then selection, then a template-based draft, then a human pass, then social repurposing. My order for building it:

1. Sourcing and selection first. That's where the time goes.
2. One prompt per template section, each with its own tone.
3. Generate the intro last, since it summarizes what's already in the issue.

Can AI curate a community or Slack group the same way?

Yes. One of the biggest problems with Slack groups or Discord is that if you don't go in and check, there might be great stuff you miss. Tell Claude to find the most interesting and engaging posts or comments and put them in the newsletter under something like "interesting things that came up in the Slack." Now you're pushing it in front of people who never open the app.

Make it a recurring section. The more recurring your formats are, the less you have to think each time.

Whatever the AI picks, a person still reads the issue before it sends: should you send an AI newsletter without reading it.