Working out how to create a news website used to mean hiring writers or spending your evenings rewriting other people's stories. Now you can pick a niche, point an AI at the day's headlines, connect WordPress, and have fifty articles live before lunch.
That's exactly the problem. The easy version produces a site nobody trusts, Google eventually ignores, and you quietly abandon six months later. I've watched that cycle play out with autoblogs for as long as autoblogs have existed.
So if you're about to start a news website with AI, here's how I'd do it today — the steps, the decisions that matter, and the one step you must not automate away.
Step 1: Pick a niche narrow enough to have an opinion about
"Tech news" is not a niche. "AI tools for estate agents" is. "Pickleball gear and tournament news in Texas" is.
A narrow niche does three things for you. The big outlets don't bother covering it properly, so there's room to rank. Your readers share a problem, so your angle on each story actually means something to them. And it keeps your source list small enough that you can tell good stories from noise.
If you can't explain in one sentence why someone would read your take instead of the original article, the niche is too wide.
Step 2: Set up the site itself
This is the part every other guide spends the most time on, and it's the least important. A domain, hosting, and WordPress or a hosted site builder will do. Choose a clean news or magazine theme, set up categories that match your niche, and add an About page that says who's actually behind the site. Readers — and Google — want to know who's publishing.
Spend an afternoon on this, not a month. The site is the shop window. What sells is what goes in it.
Step 3: Find stories by subject, not by feed
The old way of running an automated news website was RSS: subscribe to twenty feeds and rewrite whatever comes through. The trouble is that feeds give you everything a publisher posts, not everything about your subject, and you end up rewriting the same wire story from five places.
Searching the day's news by keyword works better. You define the subjects you cover, the region, and how often to look, and you get stories about your topic from wherever they were published. Then you need something to score them and throw away duplicates, because the same story will show up a dozen times.
Step 4: Write from the source, not the headline
This is where most AI news sites fall apart. A tool sees a headline, guesses at the story, and invents the details. That's how you end up with confident articles quoting numbers that don't exist.
Whatever you use, it should read the original reporting before it writes a word, report the facts in its own words, link back to the source, and flag anything it couldn't read properly — paywalls, blocked pages — so you check it before it goes out.
Step 5: Give it a voice that's actually yours
A thousand sites rewriting the same story in the same neutral AI tone is the definition of slop. What makes your version worth reading is the voice and the angle: who you are, who you're writing for, what you think about it.
Write that down properly — your background, how you write, words you never use, how you structure a piece — and make your tool use it every time. If you run several sites, each one gets its own.
Step 6: Review before anything goes live
This is the step people automate away first, and it's the one that decides whether you're running a publication or a spam operation.
Every article should land in a review queue as a draft. You read it, fix it or bin it, and approve it. Once you've run a niche for a few weeks and you trust the output, you can loosen that — but you should be choosing to, not discovering that everything was publishing itself all along.
Google is explicit that the problem isn't AI, it's scaled content made mainly to manipulate rankings. A human reviewing every piece is the clearest line between the two. I've written more about what Google actually penalises.
Step 7: Distribute each story once, properly
A news article that only lives on your website is half-used. Each story should become a post for every network your readers are on — written for that network, not the headline pasted five times. Spread them out rather than firing everything at once.
The tool I built for this
I'll be upfront: I'm one of the people behind NewsMasher, and it's built around exactly this pipeline.
- Keyword Feeds search the day's news for your subjects and region, and an AI editor scores each story and drops duplicates.
- Stories land in a Story Queue with the score, source and link. Skipping one costs nothing.
- It reads the publisher's page before writing, and flags anything paywalled or blocked for review.
- Writing Profiles hold your voice — one per site, brand or client.
- Articles go to MasherSites or WordPress with an image, tags and a category, and it writes posts for eight social networks.
- Five safety switches control what's automatic — writing, publishing, social drafts, social sending and ads. All five start off, so out of the box everything waits for you on the review board.
It starts at $14 a month on an annual plan, and there's a seven-day money-back guarantee instead of a trial: set up one feed, run it for a week, and if you don't have articles you'd put your name to, ask for your money back.
The short version
Creating a news website with AI is a fine idea. Running an unattended one isn't. Automate finding the stories, the first draft, the image and the social posts. Keep the judgement for yourself — that's the part your readers are actually there for.
— Wayne