How to Set Up Daily News Brief Cron Jobs With Hermes Agent

Your AI agent should be working for you even while you sleep. With Hermes, you can schedule a fleet of agents to research the web, format the output, and auto-deliver morning news briefs straight to your phone for less than the cost of a coffee per month. This is the third installment in the Hermes Agent Tutorial Series, and it walks through the exact setup powering 25+ live cron jobs in production right now.

Here is exactly how to build it.

Core Concepts

• Hermes cron jobs are scheduled agent sessions, not basic scripts. Each job runs a full prompt, uses tools, and formats output before delivery.
• Telegram acts as the delivery layer. One dedicated group per content category keeps the firehose organized.
• A staggered morning cascade (10:00–10:30 ET) drops six themed briefs five minutes apart so nothing gets buried.
• DeepSeek V4 Flash keeps the entire operation at roughly $0.35 per month for 25 jobs.
• The gateway service runs locally and auto-starts on login, so the terminal does not need to be open.

Who Does This Apply To

Marketers, founders, agency owners, and SEO specialists who want a low-cost, hands-off intelligence layer feeding them daily insights across AI, finance, sports, fantasy football, SEO, entertainment, and general news. If you have ever wanted a personalized newsroom that prepares your morning briefings while you sleep, this setup is for you.

What Are Cron Jobs in Hermes?

Cron jobs in Hermes are scheduled agent sessions that run on a fixed timetable and auto-deliver their output to a destination, usually a Telegram group. Unlike a one-off chat, each job carries its own prompt, model selection, toolset, and delivery target, so the agent knows exactly what to search for, how to format the answer, and where to send it.

Run hermes cron list and the full operation becomes visible. The staggered timestamps, delivery targets, and prompt snippets all live in one config. This is what makes the Hermes AI automation pipeline so cost-efficient, running enterprise-grade scheduling on a personal machine for pennies a day.

How Much Does It Cost to Run 25 AI News Cron Jobs?

All 25 jobs cost approximately $0.35 per month running on DeepSeek V4 Flash. That is not a typo. The pricing on DeepSeek V4 Flash makes high-frequency agent automation viable for solo operators and small agencies for the first time. For context, here is how the cost stacks up against running the same setup on legacy models.

For most news digest use cases, V4 Flash is more than enough. Save the premium models for editorial capstones or weekly reports where reasoning quality matters more than raw frequency.

How Do You Create a Telegram Group for a Hermes Cron Job?

Open Telegram, tap the pencil icon, choose New Group, give it a focused name like Hermes Daily News, then add @HermesPartna_Bot. Send any message in the group so the bot registers, and switch back to the terminal.

Dedicate one group per content vertical. Mixing fantasy football headlines with finance briefs in the same channel destroys signal. The current production setup uses a separate group for daily news, entertainment, fantasy, RSS-based SEO, weekly SERP rankings, and finance. Each one gets a clean, scannable feed without context-switching tax.

How Do You Get the Telegram Chat ID for Hermes?

Run send_message action='list' in the terminal. The new group will appear in the output, and the chat ID is the negative number (for example -1001234567890). If it does not show up, fall back to cat ~/.hermes/channel_directory.json | grep -A 5 telegram to pull it from the local config.

How Do You Set Up a Hermes Cron Job for a Daily News Brief?

Use cronjob action='create' with six required fields: name, schedule, model, deliver, toolsets, and prompt. The schedule uses standard cron syntax (see crontab.guru for a quick reference), the model is JSON with provider and model name, the deliver field points to the Telegram chat ID, and the prompt carries an [IMPORTANT] preamble that tells the agent it is running scheduled and should not call send_message directly.

cronjob action='create' \\
  name='Daily Demo News Digest' \\
  schedule='0 10 * * *' \\
  model='{"provider": "custom:deepseek-direct", "model": "deepseek-v4-flash"}' \\
  deliver='telegram:-1001234567890' \\
  toolsets='["web"]' \\
  prompt='[IMPORTANT: scheduled cron job. DELIVERY: auto-delivered, do NOT use send_message. SILENT: respond with exactly "[SILENT]" if nothing to report.]
Search for todays top headlines. Compile 5-7 stories into a morning digest.
For each story: Bold headline, Source, 1-2 sentence Summary, URL.
Format:
📰 **Demo News Digest - [Date]**
1. **Headline**
   Source: ...
   Summary: ...
   URL: ...'

Replace -1001234567890 with the actual chat ID from the previous step. Confirm registration with cronjob action='list' | grep -A 10 "Demo News". The next_run_at field should show tomorrow at 10:00.

How Do You Test a Hermes Cron Job Without Waiting for the Schedule?

Run cronjob action='run' job_id=<THE_JOB_ID> to fire the job immediately. The agent kicks off in real time, searches the web with the configured toolset, formats the digest, and auto-delivers it to the assigned Telegram group within 15 to 30 seconds. This is the demo moment when the camera is rolling.

The Morning Cascade: Six Digests in 30 Minutes

Stagger digests five minutes apart so the phone does not buzz once with everything at the same time. The current production cascade looks like this.

An afternoon entertainment block runs 3PM–7PM with TV, film, music, and an editorial daily digest as the capstone. The full lineup also includes weekly SERP ranking reports, a stock portfolio refresh, nightly Obsidian brain dumps, business email research, and the Session Cleaner that organizes AI chat sessions overnight.

Why Run Cron Jobs Through Hermes Instead of a Chatbot?

A chatbot waits for you to ask. An agent works while you are doing something else. That is the entire shift. Agentic AI like Hermes is where the next decade of software is heading, and cron jobs are the lowest-friction way to actually feel the difference in your daily workflow.

The gateway service handles all of this locally. Run hermes gateway install once, enable auto-start on login, and the cron scheduler stays alive in the background. No VPS, no cloud bill, no terminal window pinned to the corner of the screen.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to keep my terminal open for cron jobs to run?

No. The gateway service runs in the background. As long as your machine is awake at the scheduled time, the job fires.

What happens if the agent finds nothing newsworthy?

The prompt instructs the agent to respond with exactly [SILENT], which suppresses the Telegram delivery. No empty briefs cluttering the group.

Can I send to channels other than Telegram?

Yes. The deliver field supports multiple destinations. Telegram is the cleanest for fast mobile review, but Slack, email, and webhook destinations are all valid targets.

How do I delete a cron job?

Run cronjob action='remove' job_id=<THE_JOB_ID>. Job stops on the next scheduler tick.

Is DeepSeek V4 Flash really capable enough for news digests?

For straightforward search, summarize, and format work it is more than capable. Upgrade to Claude Haiku or GPT-5.5 Mini only if the brief requires editorial reasoning or fact-checking nuance.

Build the Pipeline Once, Reap the Briefs Forever

This is the compounding benefit of an agentic stack. Spend an hour wiring up the cron jobs once, and a year later they are still feeding morning briefs to your phone for under five dollars in total spend. That is not a productivity tool, it is leverage.

If you want help wiring this up for your own agency or solo workflow, reach out through the contact page or browse the full suite of AI marketing automation services for an idea of where the agentic stack can be extended.

About Jason Pollak

Jason Pollak is a marketing strategist with over 10 years of experience building campaigns for entertainment brands, artists, and businesses across music, film, television, eCommerce, and B2B SaaS. As Director of Marketing at Young Money Entertainment, he grew Lil Wayne’s Facebook following from 10 million to 50 million and managed over 60 million followers across the roster. He also served as Paid Media Director at Horizon Media, launching major TV shows for History Channel, A&E, WWE, and Lifetime, and led film marketing for Utopia Distribution, generating over $10 million in revenue on a $200K media spend. Jason specializes in paid media, organic social strategy, email automation, SEO, content development, and AI-driven marketing systems. He holds a BA in English Literature from Binghamton University and a Masters in Media Studies from Brooklyn College. Learn more at jasonpollakmarketing.com.