How-to Guides
How to Build a Custom Briefing Template
A briefing template controls how the AI structures its written summary: which sections it includes, what each section is supposed to cover, and how it’s instructed to write. Every analysis you run uses a template, and NewsbookLM ships with three ready-made ones. You can use those as-is, duplicate and tweak them, or build your own from scratch.
Step 1: Go to Templates
Click Templates in the sidebar. You’ll see two groups: Built-in Templates (provided by NewsbookLM) and Custom Templates (the ones you or your team have created).
Step 2: Choose a starting point
The three built-in templates cover the most common use cases:
- Client Newsletter — a professional, client-ready briefing with an executive summary, key industry developments, competitive intelligence, and recommendations. Best for sending directly to client stakeholders.
- Personal Brief — a short, plain-language summary built for quickly catching up on a topic yourself, with quick takeaways and a short reading list.
- Personal Brand Newsletter — a subscriber-facing newsletter format with a thought-leader voice, built for sharing your own commentary and perspective with a team, followers, or an email list.
Rather than editing a built-in template directly, click Duplicate on the one closest to what you want. This creates an editable custom copy and leaves the original untouched.
Step 3: Customize the sections
Click Edit on your custom template to open the editor. You can change the name, description, and labels (tags used for organizing and filtering templates on the Templates page). The core of the template is its list of sections — each one has a section name (for example, “Executive Summary”) and an instruction describing what the AI should write there. You can add a new section, remove one you don’t need, rewrite the instructions, or drag sections to reorder them. Be specific in your instructions — the more precisely you describe what a section should contain and how long it should be, the more consistent the output.
Step 4: Assign the template to a persona
Open the persona you want to use this template with (from the Personas page) and set it as that persona’s default template. Once assigned, every Quick Analysis or scheduled briefing run for that persona will use your custom structure automatically. You can still override the template for a single run from the Quick Analysis page if needed.
Step 5: Preview the output
The easiest way to check your template is to run it. Go to Quick Analysis, select the persona (or pick your template directly from the template dropdown), and run an analysis. Read through the generated briefing and check whether each section came out the way you intended — then go back and refine the instructions if needed. Small wording changes to a section’s instruction can meaningfully change tone and length, so a quick iterate-and-test cycle is the fastest way to land on a template that fits your client’s voice.
For a full breakdown of each built-in template’s sections, see the Briefing Template Reference.