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When you share a story on NewsBlur, sometimes the whole article isn’t the point. You want to call out a specific paragraph, a key finding, a sentence that made you think. Until now, you’d have to manually copy-paste text into the comment box and add your own formatting. Now you can select any text in a story, click Quote, and it drops into the share dialog as a styled blockquote, ready for you to add your own commentary underneath.
How it works
Select text in any story and a popover appears with the usual options: Highlight, Train, and Search. There’s now a new option: Quote. Click it, and the share dialog opens with your selected text rendered as a blockquote above the comment field.
Add your own comment below the quote, or just share the quote by itself. The share button updates to say “Share with comment” when there’s a quote or comment present. If you change your mind, click the × on the blockquote to remove it.
Once shared, the blockquote renders with a left border and italic styling in the comment thread, so other readers can see exactly what caught your eye before reading your take on it.
The quote feature works anywhere text selection is available: the story detail view, highlighted text, and search results. It’s available now on the web. If you have feedback or ideas, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.
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The Intelligence Trainer has always worked with exact matches. You type a keyword, a tag, an author name, and NewsBlur filters on that literal string. Regex mode added flexibility, but you still need to know exactly what to type. If you want to hide clickbait, you’d have to enumerate every clickbait pattern you can think of. If you want to focus on stories about local government accountability, good luck expressing that as a regex.
Natural language classifiers let you describe what you want in plain English. Instead of matching keywords, NewsBlur sends your description and each story to an AI model that understands what you mean. Write “stories about practical cooking techniques, not restaurant reviews” and it just works. Write “product launch announcements” and it finds them regardless of how each site phrases it. And with image classifiers, you can filter on what’s actually shown in a story’s photos, not just what’s written in the text.
Text classifiers
Open the Intelligence Trainer on any feed and you’ll see a new section: Natural Language Text Classifier. Type a description of what you want to focus on or hide, and press Enter. Not sure if your prompt will catch the right stories? Click Test on this story to see how the classifier would score it before you save, so you can refine your wording.
Your prompt is saved as a classifier pill, just like title and author classifiers. Toggle it between focus (green) and hidden (red) to control whether matching stories are promoted or suppressed. You can add multiple prompts per feed, and each one works independently.
When you save a new prompt, NewsBlur immediately classifies your recent stories against it. Within a few seconds, you’ll see stories re-sort as the classifications come in. From then on, every new story is classified as it arrives.
The classifier sends each story’s title and content to the AI model along with your description. The model decides whether the story matches, doesn’t match, or is clearly the opposite of what you described. That three-way classification means a “focus” prompt can also actively hide stories that are the antithesis of your interest.
When a text classifier matches, you’ll see a colored pill in the story header showing which prompt matched.
Image classifiers
Image classifiers work the same way, but they look at the photos in each story instead of the text. Describe what you want to see (or hide) visually, and the AI model examines each image to decide if it matches.
Some examples:
- “Charts and data visualizations” — Focus on stories with graphs, tables, or infographics
- “Screenshots of user interfaces” — Find product announcements that include actual UI screenshots
- “Nature and landscape photography” — Surface photography posts in mixed-content feeds
- “Memes” — Hide (or focus on) image macros and memes
The image classifier is strict about what counts as a match. It only triggers when the subject is literally visible as the main focus of the image, not when something is vaguely related or appears in a logo or watermark. “Food photos” matches a photo of a plate of pasta, not a restaurant storefront.
Image classifier matches also show as pills in the story header, just like text classifiers.
Combining with classifier notifications
Natural language classifiers become even more powerful when paired with per-classifier notifications. Set up a text classifier like “breaking news about AI regulation” on a high-volume news feed, then attach a notification to that classifier pill. You’ll get a push notification or email only when a story matches your natural language description, not every time the feed publishes.
This turns NewsBlur into a semantic alert system. Instead of monitoring keywords, you’re monitoring concepts. A classifier for “security vulnerabilities in open source libraries” will catch stories whether they say “CVE,” “zero-day,” “supply chain attack,” or any other phrasing. Add a notification and you have a monitoring pipeline that understands what you care about.
Scoping
Like all classifiers in NewsBlur, natural language classifiers support three scope levels:
- Per site — Applies only to the feed you’re training (default)
- Per folder — Applies to every feed in the folder
- Global — Applies to every feed you subscribe to
A global text classifier like “sponsored content” can hide promotional stories across your entire feed list with a single prompt.
Usage-based billing
Natural language classifiers use AI models to evaluate every story, which means there’s a real cost per classification. Rather than bundling this into a fixed subscription tier, NewsBlur uses usage-based billing so you only pay for what you use.
Text classifications cost roughly a tenth of a cent per story. Image classifications cost more because they process image data, roughly half a cent per story. The actual cost depends on story length and image count, but for a typical feed publishing 30 stories a month with one text classifier, you’d pay about 5 cents a month.
You can set a monthly spending limit to cap your costs. If you hit the limit, classification pauses until the next billing cycle. Your existing cached results still show, but new stories won’t be classified until the limit resets.
Availability
Natural language text and image classifiers are available now on the web for Premium subscribers with usage-based billing enabled. Enable it from Manage > Account to get started.
If you have feedback or ideas for improvements, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.
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NewsBlur has always had an API. Every feature in the web app, the iOS app, and the Android app runs through it. But APIs are for developers. Today I’m shipping three new ways to interact with your NewsBlur: a command-line tool that puts your entire NewsBlur in your terminal, an AI skill that teaches your agent every CLI command without eating your context window, and an MCP server that connects any MCP-compatible agent directly to your account.
Quickstart
CLI tool — install and log in:
uv pip install newsblur-cli newsblur auth loginAI skill — install into Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, or any Skills-compatible tool:
npx skills add samuelclay/newsblur-cli-skillMCP server — connect from Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, or any MCP client:
claude mcp add --transport http newsblur https://newsblur.com/mcp/All three require a Premium Archive or Premium Pro subscription. On first use, a browser window opens for OAuth authorization. Your token is stored locally and you can revoke access at any time.
CLI tool
Everything you do in NewsBlur, from your terminal. Full documentation is on the CLI feature page.
Read stories from feeds, folders, or everything at once:
newsblur stories list # unread stories newsblur stories list --folder Tech --limit 5 # filter by folder newsblur stories search "machine learning" # full-text search newsblur stories saved --tag research # saved stories by tag newsblur stories infrequent # rarely-publishing feeds newsblur stories original 123:abc456 # fetch full article textGet your daily briefing with AI-curated summaries:
newsblur briefing # today's briefing newsblur briefing --limit 1 # just the latest newsblur briefing --json # structured outputManage feeds and folders:
newsblur feeds list # all subscriptions newsblur feeds folders # folder tree with counts newsblur feeds add https://example.com # subscribe newsblur feeds add https://blog.com -f Tech # subscribe into a folder newsblur feeds remove 42 # unsubscribe newsblur feeds organize move_feed --feed-id 42 --from News --to TechTake actions on stories:
newsblur save 123:abc --tag ai --tag research # save with tags newsblur unsave 123:abc # remove from saved newsblur read --feed 42 # mark feed as read newsblur share 123:abc --comment "Worth reading"Train your intelligence classifiers:
newsblur train show --feed 42 # view current training newsblur train like --feed 42 --author "Name" # train a like newsblur train dislike --feed 42 --tag sponsor # train a dislikeDiscover new feeds:
newsblur discover search "machine learning" # search by topic newsblur discover similar --feed 42 # find similar feeds newsblur discover trending # trending feedsEvery command supports
--jsonfor structured output you can pipe to jq or use in scripts, and--rawfor unformatted text. There’s also a global--serverflag for self-hosted NewsBlur instances:newsblur --server https://my-newsblur.example.com auth login newsblur briefing --json | jq '.items[0].section_summaries'
AI skill
The CLI is great on its own, but it’s even better when your AI agent knows every command. The NewsBlur CLI skill teaches your agent the full command reference: every subcommand, every flag, every output format. Install it with one command and your agent can read feeds, search stories, train classifiers, and manage subscriptions on your behalf.
npx skills add samuelclay/newsblur-cli-skillThe
npx skills addcommand works with any tool that supports the Skills standard: Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, and dozens more.
The skill has a major advantage over the MCP server for agents that support it: context efficiency. The MCP server returns raw JSON that lands in your agent’s context window. Ask for your saved ESP32 stories and you’ll burn through nearly 40,000 tokens on a single response. The skill runs the CLI instead, which returns clean, formatted text. Same query, same results, about a third of the tokens. In testing, the MCP server used 39,553 tokens for a saved stories query. The same query through the skill used 11,735.
If your tool supports skills, use the skill. If it only supports MCP, use the MCP server. If you just want to script your NewsBlur from the terminal, use the CLI directly.
MCP server
MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard that lets AI agents connect to external tools and data. With the NewsBlur MCP server, Claude, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, and any other MCP-compatible agent can read your feeds, manage your stories, train your classifiers, and organize your subscriptions.
The server exposes 22 tools that cover everything you do in NewsBlur:
Reading — List feeds and folders with unread counts. Load stories from any feed, folder, or all subscriptions at once. Filter by unread, focus, or starred. Search across your entire archive with full-text search. Pull the original article text from the source. Get your AI daily briefing. Browse stories from your rarely-publishing infrequent feeds.
Actions — Mark stories as read by hash, by feed, or by folder. Save stories with tags, notes, and highlights. Subscribe and unsubscribe. Move feeds between folders. Rename feeds and folders. Share stories to your Blurblog.
Intelligence — View your trained classifiers across all feeds. Train new likes and dislikes by author, tag, title, or text content. The full range of training levels is available, including the new super dislike that overrides all other positive scores.
Discovery — Search for new feeds by topic. Find feeds similar to ones you already follow. Browse trending feeds.
For Claude Code:
claude mcp add --transport http newsblur https://newsblur.com/mcp/For Claude Desktop, add this to your
claude_desktop_config.json:{ "newsblur": { "type": "http", "url": "https://newsblur.com/mcp/" } }Codex, Cursor, and Windsurf each have their own config format. Setup instructions for all of them are on the MCP Server feature page.
Readonly mode
Giving an AI agent access to your NewsBlur is powerful, but maybe you want to start with guardrails. The CLI has a readonly mode that blocks all write operations: no saving, no sharing, no training, no subscribing, no marking as read. Your agent can read your feeds and search your stories, but it cannot change anything.
newsblur auth readonly --onWith readonly on, any write command returns an error instead of executing. The agent sees your data but cannot touch it.
The important part is what happens when you turn it off. Disabling readonly mode logs you out and requires you to re-authenticate in the browser:
newsblur auth readonly --off # "You have been logged out and must re-authenticate." newsblur auth loginThis is deliberate. An AI agent cannot silently toggle readonly off and start making changes. Only a human sitting at a browser can re-authorize write access. If you hand the CLI to an agent and want to be sure it stays read-only, it will.
Availability
The CLI, AI skill, and MCP server are available now for Premium Archive and Premium Pro subscribers. See the MCP Server and CLI Tool feature pages for full documentation.
If you have ideas for new tools, workflows, or improvements, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.
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A few weeks ago I shipped NewsBlur v14 for iOS and Mac, a major redesign of the Apple apps. Today, Android gets the same treatment. Every screen has been reworked: the feed list, the story list, the reading view, preferences, and menus. Along with the visual overhaul, several features that were previously web-only are now on Android: Ask AI, Discover Related Sites, and the Daily Briefing.
Here’s what’s new.
Ask AI
Ask AI brings the same AI-powered Q&A from the web and iOS to Android. Open any story, tap Ask AI, and ask questions about it. Summarize a long article, get background on a developing situation, or fact-check a claim. Pick your preferred AI model and keep the conversation going with follow-ups. The Ask AI sheet matches your current theme and slides up as a bottom sheet, consistent with the share and trainer dialogs.
Discover related sites
Discover Related Sites lets you find new feeds related to any feed you’re already subscribed to. Tap the Discover button in the story list header bar, browse what’s available, and preview a feed before subscribing. Duplicate feeds are filtered out so you only see new options.
Daily Briefing
The Daily Briefing generates a personalized summary of your news, organized into sections like Top Stories, Based on Your Interests, and Long Reads. It uses native Android story rows, so it feels like a regular feed rather than a bolted-on feature. Configure your briefing frequency, writing style, and sections from the briefing view in your sidebar.
Sepia theme and refined dark themes
A new Sepia theme brings warmer tones for comfortable long reading sessions. The Dark theme has been lightened to match the iOS gray/medium palette, and the Black theme now uses true absolute black backgrounds for feed and story cells, making it ideal for OLED screens.
Story list header bar
The top of the story list now has a header bar with quick access to Discover, search, display options, and settings. The display and settings controls are split into separate menus so you can change the view without wading through unrelated options.
Redesigned reading experience
The reading view has been rethought from top to bottom. Story traversal buttons are lifted above the bottom edge for easier thumb access. A new traverse bar with refined icons shows your position and unread count. Story actions are hidden until the story finishes rendering, so you never tap a button before the content is ready. Opening a story from the list now animates smoothly into the reader, and swiping back uses an interactive gesture that tracks your finger.
Redesigned preferences and menus
Preferences have been rebuilt as a modern settings screen with inline segments instead of separate dialog pickers. The feed list menu, reading menu, and folder menus have all been redesigned with cleaner styling and better organization. Menus now scale with your device font size, so they stay readable at any accessibility setting.
Premium Archive and Pro subscriptions
You can now subscribe to Premium Archive and Premium Pro directly from the Android app. An upgrade banner appears in the story list when you’re on a lower tier, showing what you’d unlock by upgrading.
Everything else
Beyond the headline features, this release includes a long list of improvements and fixes.
Improvements
- Interactive swipe-back gesture in both the story list and reading view with predictive back support on Android 14+.
- Feed list aligned with iOS styling, with new collapse-all and expand-all toggles.
- Story header pills with compact layout and title case formatting.
- Active reading time tracking per story, synced to your account.
- Full text and regex classifiers for the Intelligence Trainer.
- Feed search field themed to match your current theme with autofill disabled.
- Sync done pill delayed until feeds actually render, so you see the update happen.
- Story thumbnails enlarged for small sizes and cropping fixed.
- Status banners at the top of the story list for loading and error states.
- Mute Sites redesigned with upgrade card and progress bar.
- Custom folder and feed icon support.
Fixes
- Fixed TransactionTooLargeException crash in the reading pager.
- Fixed database version mismatch crash on launch.
- Fixed ItemListMenuPopup crash on small and split-screen displays.
- Fixed login autofill and app switching losing input.
- Fixed story row thumbnail cropping.
- Fixed search pill text vanishing.
- Fixed story list edge back gesture interference.
- Brightened story feed titles for better readability.
Coming up next: v14.2 will bring story clustering to Android, so duplicate stories across your feeds get grouped together automatically, just like on the web.
NewsBlur v14 for Android is available now on the Google Play Store. If you have feedback or run into issues, I’d love to hear about it on the NewsBlur forum.
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NewsBlur’s Intelligence Trainer has always had a simple rule: thumbs up beats thumbs down. If a story matches both a liked and a disliked classifier, the story shows up in Focus. That works well most of the time. But sometimes you run into a topic, author, or tag that you absolutely never want to see, and a regular thumbs down isn’t enough because a single thumbs up from another classifier overrides it.
Today I’m shipping two features that give the Intelligence Trainer more teeth: super dislikes that override any number of likes, and per-classifier notifications that ping you only when specific classifiers match.
Super dislikes are available to all users – free, Premium, Premium Archive, and Premium Pro. Folder and global scoping requires Premium Archive. Per-classifier notifications are exclusive to Premium Archive and Premium Pro subscribers.
Super dislikes
A super dislike is a new third state for classifiers. The regular thumbs down hides a story unless a thumbs up overrides it. The super dislike – shown as a double thumbs-down icon – overrides everything. If a story matches a super-disliked classifier, it’s hidden no matter how many positive classifiers it also matches.
The priority order is now: AI prompt classifiers > super dislike > thumbs up > thumbs down > feed score. This means super dislikes are the strongest manual signal you can set, second only to AI classifiers.
How to use it
In the Intelligence Trainer, every classifier pill now has three clickable icons on the right side: thumbs up, thumbs down, and the double thumbs-down for super dislike. Click the double thumbs-down to super-dislike a classifier. Click it again to remove the super dislike.
An explainer banner at the top of the trainer shows the priority chain so you always know how scoring works:
- Thumbs up beats any number of thumbs down
- Super thumbs down beats any number of thumbs up
Visual highlighting
Super-disliked classifiers are highlighted in a deeper crimson color, distinct from the regular red of a normal dislike. When you’re reading stories, you’ll see the same color treatment on matched titles, authors, tags, and text, with a small double thumbs-down icon inline so you can tell at a glance why a story was scored the way it was.
Works with scopes
Super dislikes work with all scope levels. Set a global super dislike on a topic like “sponsored” and it’s hidden across every feed. Set a folder-scoped super dislike on an author and they’re hidden in that folder regardless of positive training elsewhere. The same scoping rules from regular classifiers apply.
Per-classifier notifications
NewsBlur’s notifications have always been per-feed: turn them on and you get pinged on every new story. That’s fine for low-volume feeds, but not great for a high-volume feed where you only care about specific topics or authors. You end up choosing between too many notifications or none at all.
Now you can set notifications on individual classifiers. Every classifier pill in the Intelligence Trainer has a small bell icon. Hover over it and a popover appears with four channel toggles: Email, Web, iOS, and Android. Choose any combination, and when a new story matches that specific classifier, you get notified. Everything else in the feed stays quiet.
The bell icon lights up on classifiers with active notifications, so you can see at a glance which ones will ping you.
Works with scopes and regex
Classifier notifications respect the scope system. A notification on a global “breaking news” classifier fires when any feed publishes a matching story. A notification on a folder-scoped “earnings” classifier fires only for feeds in that folder.
Regex classifiers work too. If you have a regex title or text classifier, the notification evaluates the pattern with timeout protection on every new story.
Smart deduplication
If a story already triggered a feed-level notification on a channel, the classifier notification won’t duplicate it. Each story is sent once per channel, regardless of how many classifiers or feed rules it matches. There’s also a cap of 3 stories per classifier per update cycle, so a burst of matching stories won’t flood you.
Real-world examples
Breaking news alerts. Train “breaking” as a global title classifier, set it to notify via iOS and Email. You get a push notification whenever any feed publishes a story with “breaking” in the title.
Author tracking. Follow a journalist across multiple outlets. Train their name as a global author classifier with notifications, and you’ll know the moment they publish regardless of which feed it’s in.
Keyword monitoring. Use a regex classifier for a product name or company, scoped to your industry folder. Get an email when a matching story appears, without turning on notifications for every feed in that folder.
Availability
Super dislikes are available now on the web for all NewsBlur users. Per-classifier notifications are available on the web for Premium Archive and Premium Pro subscribers – all users can see the bell icon and popover, but toggling channels requires an Archive or Pro subscription.
If you have feedback or ideas for how to make these features better, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.
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If you’ve been following along lately, you know NewsBlur has been shipping feature after feature: story clustering, timed feed muting, the new site discovery panel, Ask AI, and more. I’m not slowing down, and I want people to know about it. If you’ve been using NewsBlur for years and still love it, tell people. Post about it on LinkedIn, on X, on Facebook, on Instagram, on TikTok, wherever you hang out online. Word of mouth is still king, and it’s how NewsBlur has always grown.
To make that more rewarding, I’m launching two new features today: referrals and gift subscriptions.
Earn free premium by referring friends
Every NewsBlur user now has a personal referral link. Share it with someone, and if they sign up and subscribe, you earn free time on your current tier. There’s no cap. Your next billing date gets pushed forward automatically, so you won’t be charged while you have referral credit.
Open the Refer & Gift modal from the Manage menu to find your link. Copy it and share it however you’d like. The modal also shows your referral stats: how many people have signed up through your link, how many have subscribed, and how many years of premium you’ve earned.
The credit scales proportionally based on your tier and what your referral subscribes to. If they subscribe to your tier or higher, you get a full free year. If they subscribe to a lower tier, you get proportional credit:
- Premium subscribers earn a full free year for every referral, regardless of what tier the referred person picks
- Premium Archive subscribers earn a free year when the referral subscribes to Archive or Pro, or 4 free months for a Premium referral
- Premium Pro subscribers earn 4 free months for an Archive referral, 2 free months for Premium, or 1 free month for Pro
The higher your tier, the more it pays to refer people to higher tiers. When a referral converts, you’ll get an email confirming your credit, and your subscription renewal date adjusts automatically. No action needed on your part.
Gift a subscription to anyone
The Gift tab lets you buy a NewsBlur subscription for someone else. Pick a tier, check out through Stripe, and you’ll get a shareable gift link. The recipient clicks the link, signs up or logs in, and their premium activates instantly.
Three tiers are available as gifts:
- Premium at $36/year
- Premium Archive at $99/year
- Premium Pro at $29/month
If the gift isn’t redeemed within 90 days, you get a full refund automatically. No need to contact support or remember to follow up.
How to access it
Open the Manage menu (the gear icon at the bottom of the feed list) and choose Refer & Gift. The modal has two tabs: Refer for your referral link and stats, and Gift for purchasing gift subscriptions.
Referrals and gift subscriptions are available now on the web for all NewsBlur users. If you have feedback or ideas for improvements, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.
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Every morning I open NewsBlur and scroll through hundreds of unread stories. Most days I can keep up. But some days I just want someone to tell me what matters. What’s the big story across my feeds? What are the long reads I should save for later? What matches the topics I’ve trained as interesting?
That’s the Daily Briefing. It reads your feeds, scores every story, and writes a personalized summary organized into sections that make sense for the way you read. It shows up as a feed in your sidebar, and you can have it emailed to you on a schedule you control.
How it works
Click “Daily Briefing” in your sidebar to open the briefing view. The first time, you’ll see an onboarding screen where you configure your preferences. Hit generate and NewsBlur does the rest: it scores your stories using a mix of trending read time, feed engagement, how often you read each feed, your classifier training, and recency, then generates a written summary of the top stories.
Each briefing is organized into sections:
- Top stories — The most important stories from your feeds, ranked by a weighted score of trending engagement, how often you read each feed, your classifier training, and recency
- From infrequent sites — Stories from feeds that rarely publish, so they don’t get buried under higher-volume feeds
- Long reads for later — Longer articles worth setting time aside for, detected by word count
- Based on your interests — Stories matching your trained topics, authors, and tags, with green classifier pills showing exactly why each story was selected
- Follow-ups — New posts from feeds where you recently read other stories
- Widely covered — Stories that appear across 3 or more of your feeds, using NewsBlur’s story clustering to group duplicates
You can enable or disable any of these sections, and drag to reorder them so your briefing is organized the way you want. If you only care about top stories and classifier matches, turn off the rest.
Custom keyword sections
On top of the built-in sections, you can add up to five custom keyword sections. Type a keyword or phrase and NewsBlur uses Elasticsearch to find matching stories across your feeds, then a dedicated section is written for them. If you always want a section about “climate change” or “Apple earnings,” just add the keyword and it appears in every briefing when there’s stories that match.
Three writing styles
Choose how you want your briefing written:
- Bullets — One-sentence summaries for each story, grouped by section. Quick to scan.
- Editorial — Narrative prose that explains why each story matters and connects them thematically. Each story’s feed favicon appears as an inline bullet.
- Headlines — Just the linked story titles, nothing else. The fastest way to scan.
Delivery schedule
Set the briefing to generate once, twice, or three times a day, or weekly. Each frequency has its own delivery slots:
- Daily: Pick morning, afternoon, or evening
- Twice daily: Morning plus your choice of afternoon or evening
- Three times daily: Morning, afternoon, and evening
- Weekly: Pick the day of the week
Briefings are delivered at fixed times in your local timezone: 8:30 AM, 12:30 PM, and 5:00 PM. Each briefing only includes stories from its lookback window, and stories never repeat across same-day briefings.
Notifications
Turn on email notifications for your briefing feed and the full summary lands in your inbox, complete with feed favicons, section icons, and classifier pills. The HTML is fully inlined for email clients, so it looks right in Gmail, Apple Mail, Outlook, and everywhere else.
You can also enable web, iOS, and Android push notifications if you’d rather get a ping than an email.
Choose your model
The briefing summary is written by a language model, and you can pick which one. The same model selector from Ask AI is available here, so you can use whichever model you prefer for writing style and quality.
Your data stays yours
The briefing uses your feed stories and classifier training to generate the summary. Story content is sent to the model provider you choose, but NewsBlur doesn’t use your data to train models or for any purpose beyond generating your briefing. The same privacy principles from Ask AI apply here.
Availability
The Daily Briefing is available now on the web for Premium Archive and Premium Pro subscribers. You can configure everything from the briefing view in the sidebar.
All users can open the Daily Briefing to see a preview with a handful of top stories. To unlock full briefings with all sections, custom keywords, and scheduled delivery, upgrade to Premium Archive.
If you have feedback or ideas for how to make the Daily Briefing better, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.
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If you subscribe to more than a handful of news feeds, you’ve hit this problem: a story breaks, and suddenly the same headline appears across five, ten, twenty of your subscriptions. You’re reading the same article over and over, just published by different outlets. Your river view fills up with duplicates, and the stories you haven’t read yet get buried.
Story clustering solves this. When NewsBlur detects that multiple feeds are covering the same story, it groups them together and shows you the highest-scoring version. The duplicates don’t disappear – they fold neatly underneath, so you can still see who else reported it and jump to their version if you want a different perspective.
How it works
In the story titles list, clustered stories show their sources directly below the representative story. Each source shows the feed’s favicon, feed name, story title, and how long ago it was published. Click any source to read that version instead.
When you open a clustered story, the detail view shows rich cards for each alternative source at the bottom. These cards include the feed icon, story title, a content preview, the article’s thumbnail image, author, and date. Click any card to jump to that version of the story.
Two layers of detection
Clustering uses two complementary approaches to catch duplicates:
Title matching is the fast, obvious check. NewsBlur normalizes story titles (lowercasing, stripping punctuation) and groups exact matches. But it also does fuzzy matching using significant-word overlap – so “Apple Announces New iPhone” and “Apple Reveals the New iPhone at WWDC” will still cluster together, even though the titles aren’t identical.
Semantic matching goes deeper. NewsBlur sends each story’s title to Elasticsearch’s more_like_this query, searching across all your subscribed feeds for articles covering the same topic. This catches stories that are about the same event but written with completely different headlines. The two layers are merged, so title matches and semantic matches combine into a single cluster.
Clustering runs automatically in the background every time a feed updates. Results are cached for 14 days, so clusters are ready instantly when you load your river.
Mark duplicates as read
When you read a clustered story, you can optionally have NewsBlur mark all the duplicates as read too. This is off by default – enable it in the feed options popover under “Story Clustering” or in Manage > Preferences > Stories.
There are two controls:
- Cluster related stories / Keep stories separate – Toggles clustering on or off. When enabled, duplicate stories are grouped in your river view. When disabled, every story appears individually as before.
- Mark all as read / Keep others unread – When you read the representative story, this controls whether the other stories in the cluster are automatically marked as read.
The same options are available in the global Preferences dialog under the Stories tab.
Availability
Story clustering is available to all NewsBlur users on the web. If a feed you subscribe to has cluster data, you’ll see grouped stories automatically – no configuration needed. Clustering is now enabled by default for all users, and can be toggled off or back on in your account Preferences.
Premium Archive subscribers get full control over clustering: choose between single-line and expanded preview styles, and automatically mark duplicate stories as read when you read the representative story.
Premium and free users see clustered stories on popular feeds where cluster data already exists. You’ll see clusters most often on widely-subscribed news feeds. To unlock clustering settings and get clustering across all your feeds, upgrade to Premium Archive.
If you have feedback or ideas for improvements, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.
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Sometimes a feed gets noisy for a while. An election cycle, a product launch, a conference week. You don’t want to unsubscribe because you’ll want it back eventually, but you also don’t want 200 unread stories piling up every day. Until now, muting was all or nothing: mute a feed and it stays muted until you remember to unmute it. Usually you forget.
Now you can mute a feed for a specific duration. Pick anywhere from 1 day to 1 year using the slider, or mute indefinitely the old-fashioned way. When the time’s up, NewsBlur automatically unmutes the feed the next time you load your feeds. No reminders to set, no manual cleanup.
Two ways to mute
Right-click any feed and choose “Mute this site.” Instead of muting immediately, a slider appears with two buttons: one to mute for a set duration, and one to mute indefinitely. Drag the slider to pick your duration, from 1 day all the way to 1 year with natural stops at 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, 3 months, and so on.
The same controls are available in Site Settings. Open any feed’s settings and you’ll see a Mute section with a status message showing whether the feed is active, muted with a countdown, or muted indefinitely. The slider and buttons work the same way, and you can unmute at any time.
If a feed is on a timed mute, the right-click menu shows how much time is left next to the “Un-mute this site” option, so you always know when it’s coming back.
Auto-unmute
When a timed mute expires, NewsBlur unmutes the feed automatically the next time you open NewsBlur or refresh your feeds. There’s nothing to configure and no background job to wait for. Free accounts respect the 64-feed limit, so if you’re at the cap, the feed stays muted until you have room.
Timed muting is available now on the web for all NewsBlur users. If you have feedback or ideas, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.
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Not every website has an RSS feed. Some never did. Some had one years ago and quietly removed it. And some sites have content that updates regularly but was never structured as a feed in the first place: job boards, product listings, event calendars, changelog pages. Until now, if a site didn’t offer RSS, you were out of luck.
Web Feeds is a new feature that creates RSS feeds from any website. Point it at a URL, and NewsBlur analyzes the page structure, identifies the repeating content patterns, and generates extraction rules that turn the page into a live feed. It works on news sites, blogs, job boards, product pages, or really anything with a list of items that changes over time.
This is a huge feature and has been requested for years. I’m so thrilled to finally be able to offer it in a way that I feel comfortable with. Other solutions including having you select story titles on a re-hosted version of the page, but it was clumsy and error-prone. This way, we use LLMs to figure out what the story titles are likely to be, present the variations to you, and then let you decide what’s right. So much better!
How it works
Open the Add + Discover Sites page and click the Web Feed tab. Paste a URL and click Analyze. NewsBlur fetches the page, strips out navigation and boilerplate, and analyzes the HTML structure. Within a few seconds, you’ll see multiple extraction variants, each representing a different content pattern found on the page.
Progress updates stream in real-time while the analysis runs. NewsBlur typically finds 3-5 different extraction patterns on a page. The first variant is usually the main content (article list, blog posts, product grid), but sometimes the page has multiple distinct sections worth subscribing to. Each variant shows a label, a description of what it captures, and a preview of 3 extracted stories so you can see exactly what you’d get.
Select the variant that matches what you want to follow, pick a folder, and subscribe. NewsBlur will re-fetch and re-extract the page on a regular schedule, just like any other feed.
Story hints
Sometimes the initial best guess isn’t what you’re looking for. Maybe the page has a blog section and a job listings section, and you want the jobs. Click the Refine button and type a hint like “I’m looking for the job postings.” NewsBlur re-analyzes the page with your hint in mind and reorders the variants to prioritize what you described.
What gets extracted
For each story, NewsBlur extracts whatever it can find: title, link, content snippet, image, author, and date. Not every field will be available on every site, and that’s fine. At minimum you’ll get titles and links. The extraction uses XPath expressions, which means it’s precise and consistent across page refreshes as long as the site’s HTML structure stays the same.
When things change
Websites redesign. HTML structures shift. When NewsBlur detects that the extraction rules have stopped working (after 3 consecutive failures), the feed is flagged as needing re-analysis. You’ll see a feed exception indicator, and you can re-analyze the page with one click to generate updated extraction rules.
Use cases
Some examples of sites that work well with Web Feeds:
- Company blogs without RSS — Many corporate blogs dropped their RSS feeds years ago. Web Feeds brings them back.
- Job boards — Track new postings on a company’s careers page.
- Government sites — Follow press releases, meeting agendas, or public notices.
- Changelog pages — Monitor when a tool or service ships updates.
- Event listings — Keep tabs on upcoming concerts, conferences, or local events.
- Product pages — Watch for new arrivals or restocks on stores that don’t offer feeds.
Availability
Web Feeds are available to Premium Archive and Premium Pro subscribers. The ongoing feed fetching and extraction runs on NewsBlur’s servers like any other feed.
If you have feedback or ideas for improvements, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.
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