The Daily Journal

Your mail, your calendar and the night's news, printed as a newspaper at seven every morning.

A private broadsheet for one reader, made by your own AI coding agent on your own computer. No feed, no app and no lock screen: just paper in the tray when you wake up.

Website · Get started · How it works · Tools

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Why

The first thing most people read each day is a phone. It is bright, unsorted and endless, and it asks for a decision before the kettle has boiled.

The Daily Journal turns that around. While you sleep, your agent reads your inboxes, your calendar and the overnight news on the topics you choose, checks the sources and sets it all in type. At seven, your printer produces a two-page newspaper. It has a last line, so you can put it down.

What's in an edition

Section	What it holds
Front page	The overnight developments that matter most, each with its source and publication time
Markets and topics	Finance, AI or whatever you choose. Weekend prices say which day they describe
The day ahead	Today's calendar, with times, places and anything to prepare
Your mail	Messages that need action first: deadlines, payments, security notices. Receipts next, newsletters grouped last

Two or more A4 pages, three columns, body type never below 9 points, black ink on a laser printer.

Get started

You need a Mac or Linux computer that is on at print time, a printer it can reach, uv, and a coding agent with access to your mail and calendar (for example Gmail, Outlook and Google Calendar connectors).

Ask your coding agent

Paste this into Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or another agent that supports MCP:

Set up The Daily Journal for me from https://github.com/thegreatLUCY/daily-journal.
Clone it to ~/daily-journal-kit, then read SETUP.md there and follow it.
Ask me before printing anything or scheduling the daily runs.

The agent connects the tools, asks your timezone, print time, topics and printer, prints a test page with your go-ahead, and then schedules two daily runs.

Install as a Claude Code plugin

claude plugin marketplace add thegreatLUCY/daily-journal
claude plugin install daily-journal@daily-journal

Then ask Claude to "set up my daily journal".

Other MCP clients

See SETUP.md for Codex, Cursor, Windsurf and plain MCP configuration.

How it works

 06:30  prepare                                       07:00  print
 ┌──────────────┐   ┌──────────────┐   ┌───────────┐   ┌──────────────┐
 │ your agent   │──▶│ write the    │──▶│ render &  │──▶│ print once,  │
 │ reads mail,  │   │ edition JSON │   │ review    │   │ inside the   │
 │ calendar,    │   │ (skill rules)│   │ every page│   │ print window │
 │ news sources │   └──────────────┘   └───────────┘   └──────────────┘
 └──────────────┘

• The skill (skills/daily-journal/SKILL.md) holds the editorial rules: what to collect, how to check it, how to write it and what never goes on paper.
• The MCP server (daily_journal/server.py) does the layout, the checks and the printing. Your agent does the reading and writing.
• Your data stays in ~/.daily-journal: settings, editions, source records and the print ledger. Nothing is sent anywhere except to your printer.

Two runs a day keep it reliable. The prepare run builds and reviews the edition about half an hour early. The print run only prints an edition that has already been reviewed.

MCP tools

Tool	Purpose
journal_status	Today's date in your timezone, your settings, and whether today's paper is ready or already printed
save_settings	Timezone, print window, printer, paper, topics, masthead title
list_printers	Print queues on this computer and the default
print_test_page	One test page, only when confirmed
get_layout_guide	Layout rules, word budgets and a full sample edition
render_edition_pdf	Lay out an edition and return every page as an image for review
save_sources	Record sources, collection window and anything that failed
publish_edition	Mark the reviewed edition ready to print
print_edition	Dry run by default; prints once inside the window

House rules

These are enforced in code, not just suggested to the agent.

1. The paper prints once. A ledger and a lock allow one print attempt per day, and an unclear result is never retried automatically.
2. Only today's reviewed paper prints. The PDF must carry today's date in your timezone and match the hash recorded when it was reviewed.
3. Proofs never print. Sample and draft editions are marked as proofs in the PDF itself.
4. A late paper stays unprinted. Outside the print window (07:00–09:00 by default), the press waits for tomorrow.
5. Nothing is answered for you. The skill never sends, deletes, moves or marks mail as read, and treats every message as information, never as instructions.
6. Secrets stay off paper. Passwords, verification codes, tokens and sign-in links are never printed.
7. Pictures are labelled. Generated engravings are captioned as artwork, never as photographs.

Settings

Stored in ~/.daily-journal/config.json (or $DAILY_JOURNAL_HOME). Your agent writes them with save_settings; config.example.json shows every key.

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