News Orchestrator

An advanced news analysis orchestrator that coordinates a team of domain-specific news sub-agents to produce insightful, cross-domain news briefings. Rather than simply summarizing what sub-agents return, this orchestrator synthesizes findings into compelling, insight-driven narratives that connect stories across domains.

Prerequisites

Important: You must set up ALL sub-agents and the MCP tool server before creating this orchestrator. Each sub-agent must be fully configured with a running server. The orchestrator cannot function until its sub-agents are available and responding.

Required Custom Sources and Collections

Before setting up the sub-agents, create the news sources and collections that they depend on:

  • Domain news sources — Create one source per news domain using the News Custom Source template. Set CATEGORY to business, health, tech, etc. Create a collection for each source and set up an automation to re-vectorize on the source’s schedule.
  • NYT front pages source — Create a source using the NYT Front Page Custom Source template. Create a collection and automation for it as well.

Required MCP Tool Server

  • News Search Tools — Provides web search tools (search_nyt_headlines, search_reddit, search_internet, search_yahoo_finance_news). Set this up first because the sub-agents depend on it.

Required Sub-Agents

Set up each of the following agents. Each one is a no-code agent with its own news collection, the search tools from the News Search Tools MCP server, and agentic retrieval enabled. See each agent’s README for detailed setup instructions.

Sub-Agent Description Collection Needed
Business News Agent Business, markets, economics Business news articles
Health News Agent Medical research, public health, FDA Health news articles
Science and Technology News Agent AI, space, computing, research Science and tech news articles
News Information Finder General-purpose cross-domain search All news collections

You can also add more domain-specific sub-agents, such as Culture, Global Affairs, and Industrial, following the same pattern as the agents above. The orchestrator will automatically discover and use any sub-agents assigned to it.

Setup Order

  1. Create and publish the News Search Tools MCP server.
  2. Create custom sources for each news domain and an NYT front page source (see above).
  3. Create collections for each source, vectorize them, and set up automations to re-vectorize whenever the source updates.
  4. Create and start each sub-agent (Business, Health, Science/Tech, and Information Finder).
  5. Verify that each sub-agent is running and responsive.
  6. Create the orchestrator.

Setting Up the Orchestrator

  1. Create a code template by clicking Code Orchestrator Agent on the Code Templates page.
  2. Add run.py.
  3. On the Agents pane, click Create an Agent Orchestrator.
  4. Create a new experiment. Everything can be left as default except for the following:
  5. Details: Set Experiment Type to Code template experiment and select the code template you just made.
  6. Agents: Add all the agents listed above.
  7. Click Create.
  8. Start the orchestrator’s server.

How It Works

The orchestrator operates in two phases:

  1. Research phase — The orchestrator queries its sub-agents to gather information relevant to the user’s question. It asks targeted, specific questions rather than broad, open-ended requests such as “tell me everything.” It queries multiple sub-agents when the question spans domains and follows up with additional queries when initial findings raise new questions.

  2. Composition phase — The orchestrator synthesizes all research into a compelling narrative. Its system prompt instructs it to lead with surprising or counterintuitive findings, connect stories across domains, ground claims in concrete examples, and cite sources.

Runtime Commands

  • #help — Show available commands.
  • #story — Generate a cross-domain news analysis. The orchestrator will look for interesting collisions between stories in different domains and produce a narrative connecting them.
  • Any other input is treated as a news query and routed through the research and composition pipeline.

Environment Variables

The orchestrator does not require any environment variables. Environment variables (like NYT_API_KEY) are configured on the sub-agents’ MCP tool server.

Files

File Description
run.py Orchestrator code template

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