I used to get my news the way a lot of people get their news, which is to say I didn’t really get it at all. I got it in pieces, between other pieces, usually late at night with the lights already off. It was a habit before it was ever a routine, and I knew it wasn’t a good one.
The part that bothered me wasn’t the time, though there was a lot of that. It was that at the end of an hour I couldn’t tell you one thing I had learned. I would put the phone down with the distinct feeling of having been informed, and if you had asked me about a single story I would have come up empty. Something was happening in that hour. It just wasn’t that.
So I wanted to log off. The problem was that logging off meant falling behind, and I didn’t want that either. I wanted both things at once, which in my experience is usually the moment right before you start building something.
This is the point where a reasonable person subscribes to a newsletter. There are good ones. But the thing I kept catching on is the shape of the news itself. The same story lands in five places on the same morning, and each one tells me most of what the last one already did. Going source to source to assemble one clear picture is tedious, and it is the same tedious work tomorrow, and the day after that. At some point it stopped feeling like a reading problem and started feeling like an engineering problem. If five outlets are covering one story, something should be able to notice that, fold them into a single thing, and hand it to me already made.
I do data and AI engineering for a living, so that part was my cup of tea. I built it over about a month, mostly at night, in the hours after work. I am the kind of person who writes everything down, so my notes app spent that month permanently open, collecting ideas at whatever hour they showed up.
The first time it ran end to end was the night before I expected it to work at all. I sat there smiling cheek to cheek at what was, objectively, a folder full of text. But it felt like the real thing. Four topics I actually cared about, AI, cybersecurity, technology and business, collected and sorted and written up while I was asleep.
Since then it has arrived every morning around nine, and I listen to the podcast version while I get ready. That is the whole thing. That is what I wanted.
It is not flawless. For a good while the audio build sat in front of the publish step, which meant that if the podcast failed, the newsletter it was attached to didn’t go out. There was a fallback, so there were still stories to read, but I want to be clear about how silly that is. The fun part could stop the useful part from shipping. It is on the list. Everything is on some list.
What made it stop being only mine was a screenshot. I had shown a friend what I built, the way you show someone a thing you are a little proud of and a little embarrassed by. Some time later he sent me a picture of that morning’s edition and told me he had been listening to the podcast while doing his laundry. He had bookmarked it. He was just using it, on an ordinary weekday, without me in the room.
That was the moment I saw the potential. Not a newsletter I read, but something that could go a lot further.
Reading something you made every single day teaches you what it isn’t. I started noticing the questions the newsletter couldn’t answer. What if I could say how long I wanted it to be today. What if the topics weren’t my four, but yours, whatever yours happen to be. What if, when a story landed that I only half understood, I could just ask about it, and keep asking until I actually did.
That last one is the one I can’t stop thinking about. Being able to talk to the news might be the best way there is to understand it.
So that is Norm. The name started as the editor, the one running the newsroom in my head, and it has quietly become the name of the whole thing. Same idea as the newsletter, except curated for you instead of for me.
The newsletter still runs every morning. I still listen while I get ready.
This is just the beginning, and there is so much more to come. I’m glad you’re here for the ride.