The problem
Newsletters accumulate faster than attention. The reading list grows; the reading doesn’t.
The content is worth having — but the format is wrong. Reading requires sitting down. Audio doesn’t.
What it does
At 6am every day, a pipeline runs without being asked:
- Fetches Gmail newsletters by label — news, think pieces, professional
- Triages them into three category buckets
- Creates NotebookLM notebooks from the content
- Generates ~12-minute audio overviews per category
- Uploads to Element.fm
- Surfaces in Apple Podcasts
Three episodes, ready before breakfast. Built from what was already being sent to the inbox.
The design
The pipeline doesn’t introduce new reading — it converts existing subscriptions. Nothing requires curation or setup once it’s running. The only decision made upfront is which Gmail labels to watch.
The audio format is the point: a synthesized overview that captures what mattered across a set of sources, in a form that fits into a commute or a walk. NotebookLM’s audio overview is well-suited to this because it’s designed for multi-source synthesis, not single-document narration.
A CLI (rwe-publish) handles edge cases: --show-status, --upload-only, --dry-run. launchd runs the main job. The rest is invisible.
Status
Working, not finished. Runs most days. A few things need to stabilise before it’s ready for wider use: the MCP tool auth requires periodic revalidation, and the hosting platform has had reliability issues. These are the open edges.