How I Built an AI News Editor to Save Youth Sports from Info Overload

Every morning, the same ritual

I wake up, grab my phone, and start scrolling. Fifty unread messages in the group chat. Twitter's trending page has already changed three times. Push notifications pile up like snow. Then I check a few sports forums, and there's always a 'breaking' update about a game, a player, or a rule change.

Ten minutes later, I feel like I've seen everything and nothing at all. I know stuff happened, but I can't tell you what actually mattered. A team signed a new quarterback. A high school league changed its playoff format. A new training gadget hit the market. Every headline looks worth tapping, but after reading them all, I'm left with almost nothing.

We used to worry about not enough info. Now the problem is too much, and it's swallowing our judgment along with our time.

So I built my own filter

I decided to fight back. I'm not a programmer or a data scientist—I'm just a youth sports editor who was tired of drowning in noise. My weapon: an AI agent that acts like a personal news editor. It reads hundreds of sources, picks out what's real, and hands me a clean briefing every morning.

Here's how I did it, and how you can too.

Step 1: Stop scraping the bottom of the barrel

At first, I set up a simple bot. Every day at 8 a.m., it would search the web for the last 24 hours of youth sports news and send me five headlines. It worked—kind of. I'd get my coffee, and there'd be a neat list waiting for me.

But the novelty wore off fast. The same story would pop up three times with different wording. A piece I'd already read yesterday would resurface as 'new' because another site had rewritten it. The bot wasn't lazy; it was just getting raw internet garbage.

Search engines don't care about quality. They give you everything: official announcements, blog rants, copied articles, clickbait—all looking equally 'new.' Hand that mess to an AI, and it'll summarize fast, but it can't tell you what's worth your time.

The fix? Be picky about where the info comes from.

Step 2: Build a tiered source list

I started by curating my own RSS feeds. I now subscribe to 161 of them, but it's not about quantity. It's about trust. I sorted them into tiers:

• Primary sources: Official league sites, team announcements, school press releases. This is where news is born.
• Serious outlets: Local newspapers, national sports desks, investigative reporters. They double-check facts.
• Secondary and aggregators: Niche blogs, fan sites, forums. Great for context and opinion, but not gospel.
• Insiders and experts: Coaches, scouts, and analysts on social media. Useful for behind-the-scenes nuggets.

For youth sports, this might mean following your state's high school athletic association, a few reputable local sports reporters, and a handful of respected national sites.

Step 3: Organize your feeds like a magazine

With 161 feeds, you need a system. I use an RSS reader called Folo. It's old-school, but it puts you in control. You can group feeds by sport, region, or topic—just like a custom magazine.

My Folo has folders for football, basketball, soccer, and general youth sports news. Each morning, I can skim through the headlines in seconds. No algorithm deciding what I see. I do.

Step 4: Connect your reader to your AI

Folo has a command-line tool that lets my AI agent read my unread items directly. So now, when my agent runs, it's not scraping random sites—it's reading the feeds I've already vetted.

The agent then applies what I call 'editor judgment':

• Merge duplicates: If three sources cover the same game, it combines them into one solid recap.
• Cross-verify: It compares details from different outlets and flags any contradictions.
• Go to the source: If an official announcement exists, that's what gets highlighted.

This cuts the noise by 80%. I get one clean briefing instead of thirty tabs.

Step 5: Train your AI to know your taste

Even with good sources, the AI might push stories you don't care about. For me, it kept sending me national recruiting news when I really wanted local league updates. So I told it: 'Less national stuff, more regional high school games.'

The agent saved that preference to a file, and now it filters accordingly. It's like training a junior editor. You have to correct them a few times before they get it right.

Step 6: Turn the briefing into a visual story

Text lists are boring. So I had the agent generate an HTML page—a 'cyber newspaper' just for me. It shows the top five stories as clean cards, each with a headline, the key facts, why it matters, and links to the original sources.

You can do the same for a specific topic. For example, I wanted to track rumors about a possible folding-screen iPhone. The agent built a dynamic page with a timeline, a source map, and credibility labels for each rumor. It even showed how likely each claim was—'confirmed,' 'corroborated,' 'single source,' or 'unverified.'

That kind of transparency is gold. It kills the anxiety of missing something because you can see exactly what's known and what's speculation.

Why this matters for youth sports

Youth sports are drowning in slop—AI-generated content, recycled press releases, and hype. Parents, coaches, and athletes need real news: schedule changes, safety updates, scholarship opportunities. My system helps me cut through the noise and focus on what actually affects my community.

Last week, it flagged a rule change in our state's high school soccer league that would have been buried under national headlines. That's the kind of thing parents need to know. My AI editor caught it because I'd subscribed to the right sources.

Build your own dam

You don't need to be a tech wizard. Just start small: pick ten trustworthy sources, get an RSS reader, and let an AI summarize them. Correct it when it misses. Add more sources as you go.

The goal isn't to read everything. It's to read what matters. My AI editor doesn't replace my judgment—it just clears the rubble so I can see the path.

Now, when I open my phone in the morning, I get a clean, honest briefing. I know what happened, and I know why it matters. That's a feeling worth building for yourself.