My wife and I have an eight-year old boy, studying in a bilingual school in Shanghai, China. He is becoming increasingly curious about the bigger world outside the school and wants to stay current to the major events happening around the globe. We liked this development and thought this could turn into another effective method to further elevate his English. We went on a mission to find quality English (or Chinese, for that matter) news reading materials for him. We searched high and low for more than a year, and could not find any.

News used to be simple, elegant, and trust-worthy. The Economist used to just give you the download you need but not any more. Nowadays, from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, BBC, NPR, Associated Press, Bloomberg to the Guardian, they are all too biased with too many ideological lens imposed, occasionally mixed with misinformation or even disinformation. It is very hard to find a media outlet that can serve balanced views and preserve human stories in their raw forms.

Also, it is not easy to find the right format for such a news service. Many Youtubers produce excellent news for adults but not for kids. We don’t want our kid to watch excessive videos. Podcast has become a major source of news for us in the last 10 years but all the Fridmans, Ferrisses, and Rogans are getting longer and longer with episodes routinely running up to 3 hours. It is getting out of control, even for us.

So we figured we might as well take things into our own hands and create a newsletter for our son and his many little buddies. AI is becoming a very powerful tool to automate this laborious workflow of sourcing news, curating stories and editing texts/pictures. I use chatGPT and DeepSeek to get the top trending news on various topics, curate their contents to make sure they are kids-friendly, summarize the stories in plain English, and find a picture or two to light up the whole issue. Substack expertly handles the rest of harassing you guys, my dear readers 😜.

Our son liked the first issue very much. We hope you, or your son/daughter would enjoy this series too. We find it an intellectually joyful process to compose each issue as we catch up with the world after a week of busy working and living. It feels like not only just a service for the next generation, but also an escape into a sanctuary of our own.

Yours truly

Clayton Man

Last modified on 2025-01-30