How your morning episode gets made: story selection, explained

Your favorite newsletter just landed in your inbox. When your morning episode gets made, will it pick the stories you actually care about?

The short answer

Your episode covers the stories that matter to you, drawn from the newsletters you forward to Harkwire. You shape it with two choices: which newsletters you route to your private forwarding address, and which episode length you pick, Brief at 1 to 3 minutes, Morning Update at 3 to 6, Deep Dive at 6 to 12 on the Pro plan. The two AI hosts, Alex and Sam, talk the stories through like a morning radio show about your inbox. You never hear a flat read-out.

How the stories get picked

Every morning, the AI reads each newsletter that arrived overnight from your subscribed sources and ranks the stories on three criteria: relevance (does this matter to someone who chose these newsletters?), freshness (is this genuinely from the last 24 hours, not a re-tread of last week's news?), and importance (a market move outranks a roundup link).

When two newsletters cover the same story, the show merges them into one segment, so you hear both angles without the repetition. From what is left, it picks the stories that fit the episode length you chose: one for a Brief, up to three for a Morning Update, and up to six for a Deep Dive on the Pro plan.

What a good morning episode sounds like

A good episode feels like a show made for one listener: you. The big stories from your newsletters get the most airtime. Stories that touch your interests get room to breathe. Everything else stays on the cutting-room floor.

• The stories you would hear about anyway. If a story leads every newsletter you read, it leads your episode too, told in context.
• Stories from your beat. If you forward a cycling newsletter every week, your episode keeps up with cycling. The show follows your subscriptions, so your beat is whatever you read.
• Nothing that wastes your minutes. Ads, photo captions, signup banners and footer boilerplate never make it in. The episode keeps the news and drops the noise.

Picture tomorrow morning. Your episode opens with the one story everyone is talking about, moves to the two or three stories from your newsletters that matter to your beat, and wraps before your coffee goes cold. Nothing lingers and nothing pads the runtime. When it ends, you are caught up, and your inbox can stay unread without guilt.

This beats skimming headlines. Instead of twenty open tabs you will never close, you get one short conversation that catches you up. One listen, and you are done.

How your interests shape the show

You are the editor-in-chief, and your desk is simple. The newsletters you forward to your private address are the raw material for every episode. Route a newsletter in, and its stories become part of the show. Stop forwarding one, and it fades out. There is no settings page to babysit. Your subscriptions are your show.

At onboarding you also pick a few interests, and Harkwire suggests five strong newsletters to start with. You can swap any of them, and the daily edition responds to your list from the next morning on.

Your episode length choice matters too, because it decides how much room stories get. A Brief keeps the highlights only and moves fast. A Morning Update gives the day's news a proper talk-through. A Deep Dive, on the Pro plan, lets the big stories develop, with space for the details that matter to you. Pick the one that fits your commute, your coffee, or your walk, and switch anytime from Settings. The next episode picks up the new length.

One more lever, on the Pro plan: a watchlist puts the companies and people you track at the top of the episode.

One honest note about what the show does not track. Harkwire has no app of its own, so it cannot watch what you skip or replay. The only signal it sees is your newsletter list. If a newsletter stops feeling relevant, the fix is on your end: stop forwarding it, and the next morning's edition responds. Your interests show up in what you feed it, nothing more and nothing less.

Keeping up with a beat, day after day

Story selection is not a one-morning thing. Your show runs every day, so it follows the stories that keep developing. A trade deal announced on Monday becomes the negotiation update on Wednesday becomes the signed agreement on Friday. You hear each chapter as it happens, in the same morning slot, without tracking anything yourself.

This is where forwarding your favorite newsletter pays off. A beat you care about, cycling transfers, central bank moves, AI regulation, shows up in your episode as often as it shows up in your reading. The show mirrors the rhythms of your subscriptions: quiet weeks stay quiet, big weeks get the full treatment. You feel caught up without keeping a running list in your head.

Why listening is the only job you have

Story selection exists for one reason: so you never have to do it yourself. The episode lands in your private podcast feed by 7am in your timezone, and the day's stories are already chosen, ordered, and talked through. Your job is to press play and listen.

Reading five newsletters takes real time and real attention, the kind mornings rarely have. A short episode turns that same pile into something you finish while the coffee brews. The selection work happens ahead of each episode; the listening happens when you want it.

The honest limits

A few things to know up front, because there is always fine print.

• Free newsletters only. Paid newsletters are not supported yet, so only the free ones you forward make it into the show.
• Built for newsletters. The show takes newsletters specifically, which means arbitrary web links and PDFs do not make the cut.
• No Spotify. The private feed will not play in Spotify, which does not let you add a show by URL. Apple Podcasts, Overcast, and Pocket Casts all do.

For the full setup, the hub guide to listening to your newsletters as a podcast walks through getting the feed into your app.

Your inbox can stay unread. By 7am the episode is in your feed, stories picked, noise dropped, and listening is the only work left.