NewsBot — OpenClaw News-to-Twitter Agent

NewsBot is a fully autonomous OpenClaw agent that monitors RSS news sources around the clock, researches stories, and publishes clean factual tweets to Twitter/X without you having to lift a finger.

It runs on your machine as an OpenClaw agent, waking up on a heartbeat schedule to scan your configured sources, deduplicate stories it's already covered, read the full article before writing anything, and post in your name. Everything is controlled through plain Markdown files you can edit in any text editor.

What It Does

• Monitors news sources — polls RSS/Atom feeds from any news site on a configurable schedule
• Prioritizes breaking news — sources marked [PRIORITY] are polled every 30 minutes; standard sources every 60 minutes
• Reads full articles — never tweets from a headline alone; fetches and digests the actual story first
• Deduplicates automatically — keeps a running list of posted URLs so the same story is never tweeted twice
• Writes clean tweets — factual, concise, no clickbait, max 280 characters including the source URL
• Rate-limits itself — configurable max tweets per day and minimum gap between posts
• Logs everything — every tweet is recorded in TWEET_LOG.md; daily summaries are sent to your chat channel
• Alerts on errors — if something breaks (Twitter API down, source unreachable), it tells you

File Overview

news-twitter-agent/
├── AGENTS.md          ← Core behavior rules (fetch → research → tweet → log)
├── SOUL.md            ← Personality: sharp wire-desk editor, accuracy first
├── IDENTITY.md        ← Name, emoji, chat message style
├── HEARTBEAT.md       ← Scheduled task definitions (when to run what)
├── NEWS_SOURCES.md    ← ★ Your main config: sources, limits, topic filters
├── MEMORY.md          ← Auto-managed deduplication list of posted URLs
├── TWEET_LOG.md       ← Append-only structured tweet history
├── TOOLS.md           ← Tool usage reference for the agent
├── memory/            ← Daily log files (auto-created by the agent)
└── skills/
    └── news-twitter/
        ├── SKILL.md        ← OpenClaw skill descriptor
        ├── post_tweet.js   ← OAuth 1.0a signer + Twitter v2 API poster
        ├── parse_rss.js    ← RSS/Atom feed parser
        └── log_tweet.js    ← Post-tweet logging utility

Key Design Decisions

Config-as-files. Every behavior is controlled by a Markdown file on disk. Want to add a news source? Edit NEWS_SOURCES.md. Want NewsBot to tweet more aggressively? Change MAX_TWEETS_PER_DAY. No dashboard, no CLI flags, no redeploy needed.

No opinions. NewsBot is wired at the SOUL.md level to report facts and withhold editorial judgment. It won't amplify outrage, add commentary, or speculate. It writes like a wire service, not a pundit.

Deduplication by URL. MEMORY.md holds a timestamped list of every story URL posted. Before composing any tweet, the agent checks this list. Near-duplicate detection (same story, different outlet) is handled at the research step.

Read the article. The agent is instructed not to tweet from headlines alone. It fetches the full article, extracts key facts, and only then composes the tweet. This catches misleading headlines and paywalled stubs before they go out.

Self-contained skill. The skills/news-twitter/ folder ships with everything needed: an RSS parser, a Twitter OAuth signer, and a logging utility all in plain Node.js with zero external dependencies.

Configurable Parameters

All set in NEWS_SOURCES.md:

Requirements

• OpenClaw installed and running (npm install -g openclaw)
• Node.js 22+
• Twitter Developer Account with a project/app that has Read + Write permissions
• An RSS-capable news source (most major outlets provide feeds)