Turn any newsletter into a podcast with AI

The newsletter subscription problem is universal. You found a writer whose work you respect — a sharp analyst, a practitioner in your industry, a thinker whose perspective is worth your time. You subscribed. Then reality intervened: their issues arrive at a time you're not at your desk, run longer than your attention window allows, or pile up during a busy week until you're 5 issues behind and the entire inbox feels like a burden instead of a resource.

This is not a motivation problem. It's a format mismatch. Text newsletters require a specific kind of attention — seated, focused, deliberate — that competes with everything else demanding that same attention during the workday. Audio doesn't have the same constraint. It's asynchronous in a different way: it plays during the minutes that already exist between other commitments.

How newsletter-to-podcast conversion works

Most newsletters — especially those published on Substack, Beehiiv, Ghost, or self-hosted WordPress — automatically maintain an RSS feed. This is the same feed that podcast apps, Feedly, and newsreaders have used for decades. It's public, it's standard, and it requires no special permission to access.

When you add a newsletter's RSS feed to ListenBrief, the process is:

1. Every morning before your briefing generation, ListenBrief checks the RSS feed for new issues published since the last check.
2. If a new issue is available, the AI reads the full text from the feed and identifies the key arguments, findings, or developments the author is making.
3. Those insights are incorporated into your daily briefing alongside your other sources — presented in a synthesized narrative, not as a word-for-word reading of the newsletter.
4. If no new issue was published, that source is skipped for that day's briefing.

The result isn't a text-to-speech version of the newsletter. It's a synthesis: the AI extracts what matters from the issue and integrates it into a coherent audio narrative with your other sources. A technology newsletter and an industry news feed might both publish on the same theme — your briefing will connect those threads rather than presenting them as separate segments.

Finding RSS feeds for your newsletters

Substack is the easiest case: every Substack publication has an RSS feed at https://[author].substack.com/feed. Paste that URL into ListenBrief. That's all.

For other platforms:

• Beehiiv: Most Beehiiv newsletters have RSS feeds at https://[publication].beehiiv.com/feed.
• Ghost blogs: Ghost publishes RSS at https://[site]/rss by default.
• WordPress blogs and newsletters: Try appending /feed or /feed.xml to the site's homepage URL.
• Custom newsletters: If you can't find the RSS feed, ListenBrief's source finder can auto-detect it when you paste the site URL.

Some newsletters — particularly those distributed exclusively via email with no web presence — don't have RSS feeds. For those, ListenBrief cannot process the content without the author providing a feed. But this is increasingly rare: the shift to web-first newsletter platforms has made RSS feeds standard infrastructure.

Mixing newsletters with other sources

The briefing is most valuable when newsletters aren't isolated from other sources. An analyst's Substack issue arguing that AI infrastructure spending is peaking means more in context with a news article reporting an AWS earnings miss, or a YouTube channel where a practitioner describes slowing demand from enterprise clients. Your briefing synthesizes all three into a single narrative — not three separate segments.

This cross-source synthesis is what separates a ListenBrief briefing from simply listening to newsletters one at a time. The connections the AI identifies across sources are often more valuable than any single source alone.

On Pro and Power plans, you can add unlimited sources: newsletters, RSS feeds, YouTube channels, and news sites mix freely into one episode. Starter plan allows 3 total sources, which is enough for 2-3 newsletters plus one other feed.

See how feeds are processed in depth at RSS to podcast. For a broader look at morning audio habits, see AI daily briefing. And for a comparison of audio vs. reading formats, read daily briefing vs. newsletter.