FT News Auto-Summarizer & Archiver

Overview

Manually tracking and summarizing Financial Times news wastes time and risks missing key updates. This automation fetches FT.com homepage content, extracts articles with summaries, deduplicates entries, and archives AI-generated concise summaries alongside links in your Google Sheet—delivering a continuously updated financial news database without manual effort.

The Impact

Stop manual news scraping. Automatically retrieve and parse FT homepage content daily.
Kill duplicate entries. Check existing Google Sheet data before adding new summaries.
Summarize with AI precision. Generate 50-word article summaries from full text.
Archive seamlessly. Append summaries and links directly to your spreadsheet.

Who This Is For

Financial Professionals building daily market briefing databases for quick insights.
Market Researchers tracking sector trends with summarized news archives.
Knowledge Managers maintaining an auto-updating personal financial news library.
Content Creators sourcing concise summaries to fuel reports and social posts.

How It Works

Fetch FT Homepage
Send HTTP GET to https://www.ft.com to retrieve homepage HTML.

Extract Articles with Summaries
Use regex to parse html, capturing titles, links, and summaries from div.headline.js-teaser-headline and p.standfirst elements.

Deduplicate Using Google Sheets
For each article, read your sheet to verify if the link exists; skip processing if found.

Fetch Full Article & Summarize
Retrieve full article page, convert HTML to plain text, then generate a ~50-word summary using an LLM.

Archive Summary & Link
Append the JSON array of [summary, URL] as a new row in your specified Google Sheet.

What You'll Need

Before using this template, make sure you have:

A Google Sheet created to store news summaries, with known Spreadsheet ID and worksheet name.
Google Sheets API credentials configured and authorized for both reading and appending data.
Access permissions to the Financial Times website (publicly accessible).

How to Use

Step 1. Prepare Your Google Sheet

Create a new Google Sheet for storing summaries. Copy its Spreadsheet ID and note the worksheet name.

Step 2. Configure Start Node

Paste the SpreadsheetId and SheetName into the workflow's Start node inputs.

Step 3. Set Up Credentials

Ensure Google Sheets API credentials are correctly set in "Read Existing Sheet Data" and "Append Summary to Sheet" nodes.

Step 4. Run the Workflow

Trigger the workflow to fetch, summarize, and archive new Financial Times articles automatically.

Step 5. Verify Results

Check your Google Sheet for appended summaries and links to confirm successful execution.

FAQs

How does the workflow avoid adding duplicate articles?

Before processing each article, it reads all existing links in your Google Sheet and skips any article whose link is already present, ensuring no duplicates.

What method is used to extract article titles and summaries from FT.com?

The workflow uses regular expressions targeting div elements with class "headline js-teaser-headline" and p elements with class "standfirst" to extract titles, links, and summaries.

How are article summaries generated?

After fetching the full article page and converting it to plain text, a large language model generates a concise 50-word summary formatted as a JSON array with the summary and article URL.

Where are the summaries stored?

Summaries and their corresponding links are appended as new rows in your specified Google Sheets worksheet, creating an automatically updating archive.

Updated on: Aug 21, 2026

Was This Page Helpful?