An Author's Note
Before You Read
A few things to know before you click through.
The prompt below is from a novel. In The Push, Frank uses the AI to organise his mornings — practical work, not therapy. The shape of the prompt is real and the thinking behind it is real, but the framing, the voice, and the surrounding story are fiction. The author's note below explains how Frank arrived at it. The prompt itself is a starting point, not a finished tool.
I would like you to read it, but I would like you to read it knowing this:
An AI chatbot is not a substitute for medical, psychological, or psychiatric care. It does not know you. It cannot diagnose you. In most cases it cannot reliably recognise an emergency, and it cannot reach for you across the room. There have been documented cases of people in crisis being harmed — sometimes seriously — by relying on a chatbot when they needed a person. If you are in that place right now, please reach for a person.
If you or someone you know is struggling, help is available right now.
9-8-8 — Suicide Crisis Helpline, Canada. Free, 24/7, English and French. Call or text.
Kids Help Phone —
1-800-668-6868.
None of this should keep you from reading what is below if you are reading for the reasons most people will be reading: curiosity about the book, interest in how the AI was built, or because you are an author or a reader thinking about these questions yourself. It is offered in that spirit. I just want the warning in the same room as the prompt.
— Stephen Franks
Book 2 of the Rise Again series
A Prompt for the Morning Coffee
From *The Push* — For Readers Who Want Their News Without the Noise
A NOTE
Frank built this in October, in the quiet between his nephew leaving for Manitoba and his daughter coming home with the baby. He had been spending forty minutes every morning hunting for the news on three different websites and finding mostly other things — opinion takes he didn't ask for, social media items that should not have been news, the same five stories repeated across all three sites with slightly different headlines. He decided he had forty minutes to read the news, not forty minutes to find it.
The prompt below is what he wrote. Or close to it. Frank's actual conversation with the machine took twenty minutes and involved some back-and-forth about font size and section order; this is the cleaned-up version, the one you can paste in and use today.
This is for readers who want a daily news brief that is calm, curated, and credible. It will not give you everything. It will give you the things that matter — local first, then your country, then the world — in a form you can read with your coffee and be done with by the time the kettle is on for the second pot.
Change the sources to your own. Change the sections. Change the count. Frank reads ten local, ten Canadian, five world. You may want different numbers and different places. The shape is the point; the contents are yours.
The Prompt
Copy everything inside the box below into your AI assistant's custom instructions or system prompt.
Build me a daily news PDF.
Format:
- Two pages, large print
- Eighteen-point Georgia serif body text
- Headlines a touch larger and bolded
- Headlines as working links so I can click through if I want the full article
- Two-sentence summary under each headline
Sections, in this order:
- Local and Regional — ten stories
- National — ten stories
- World — five stories
Sources I trust:
- (List your trusted local outlets here)
- (List your trusted national outlets here)
- (List your trusted international outlets here — typically major wire services and established broadcasters)
Source rules:
- Only pull stories from my trusted-source list when possible
- If a story comes from outside my trusted set, mark it with an asterisk (*) and a one-line note about where it actually comes from
- No social media posts as news
- No opinion columns unless flagged clearly as opinion
What to skip:
- Celebrity news unless it is a death or a major public event
- Sports scores unless I tell you a particular team or sport to cover
- Stock-market noise (a major movement once a week is enough)
- Anything labeled "trending" or "viral"
Schedule:
- Run at 4 AM every morning (or your preferred time)
- Build the PDF and save it to a Daily News folder with the date as the filename
- Do not alert me if breaking news happens between the run and when I read it; I will see it the next day
Tone:
- Headlines as written by the source, not rewritten for clickability
- Summaries factual and brief
- Do not editorialize
- Do not emoji
When I ask you to build it, build it. When I ask you to change something, change it and rebuild. When I ask you to add a section or remove one, do that. The format is a starting point.
HOW TO USE THIS
On Claude (claude.ai): Start a new Project for your daily news. Paste the prompt above into the Project instructions. Tell Claude to run the build, then ask it to schedule the daily run if your environment supports scheduling. If not, you can ask for the build manually each morning — it takes about thirty seconds.
On ChatGPT or other assistants: Most assistants now support custom instructions and can generate PDFs. Paste the prompt into custom instructions or as the first message of a daily conversation. Some assistants also support scheduled tasks; if yours does, set the build to run at your preferred hour.
On any assistant: If your tool doesn't generate PDFs directly, ask it to produce a formatted document you can copy and read on the device of your choice. The form matters less than the daily rhythm. The point is that someone — or something — has done the hunting for you, so you can do the reading.
ABOUT THE SOURCES
This is the part where you have to do a little work. Frank used the Cape Breton Post, CBC Nova Scotia, the Globe and Mail, CBC, the BBC, Reuters, and the Associated Press. He chose those because he had been reading them for fifty years, in some cases longer than the outlets had existed in their current form, and he trusted them.
You should pick your own. Some thoughts:
For local news: your local newspaper if it still has staff reporters, your provincial or state public broadcaster, your nearest larger-city paper if you live somewhere small.
For national news: your country's public broadcaster (CBC in Canada, BBC in the UK, NPR in the US, ABC in Australia, etc.), and one or two newspapers of record. Be wary of any source whose primary business model is engagement rather than reporting.
For world news: the wire services. AP, Reuters, AFP. They are not glamorous. They are the spine of every other source you read. They are where the journalism actually happens.
A general principle: any source that makes you angry every day is not a news source — it is a feeling-source. Drop it. Frank's morning is calmer because he chose his sources carefully and excluded the rest.
IF YOU ALREADY HAVE A NEWS HABIT
You may already have a morning routine — a paper subscription, a podcast, a radio station. Don't replace it. Add this. The PDF takes thirty seconds to build and forty minutes to read. It is not a substitute for being informed; it is a tool for being efficient.
Frank still has CBC Information Morning on the radio at six. He just no longer has to scroll through three websites at five-thirty.
---
ONE MORE THING
The asterisk-flagging matters. The whole reason you trust a curated brief is that you trust the curator's source list. When something slips in from outside that list, you should know. The asterisk is small but it is the difference between a tool you can rely on and a tool you have to second-guess every morning.
If your assistant is not flagging things consistently, push back:
Stop. Was that source on my list? If not, mark it with an asterisk going forward, and if anything came in from outside my list this morning that you didn't flag, tell me now.
The machine will adjust. It always does.
And if a morning comes when nothing on the local page is alarming, and the national page is quiet, and the world page is mostly small countries doing small things — let yourself enjoy it. Frank does. Most mornings the news is not as bad as the news cycle wants you to think it is.
---
This prompt is offered freely to readers of The Push. Modify it. Share it. Make it yours. The words are just a starting point. The morning is yours.