Fetch and Rank Positive News Articles

Goodnews MCP Server is an MCP server that surfaces good, positive, and uplifting news. It fetches recent news articles from NewsAPI, then uses a Cohere LLM to analyze each article's sentiment in a zero-shot setting and rank them by positivity, returning the top-ranking good-news stories through Claude.

Use it when you want Claude to surface positive news, such as "Show me some good news from today," "What positive things happened in the world this week?", or "Give me uplifting news stories about science," as a counterweight to feeds dominated by negative headlines. It requires both a Cohere API key and a NewsAPI key, so it depends on having accounts with both services. It is a single-purpose tool for positive-sentiment news discovery, not a general news search or summarization tool for arbitrary topics or sentiment.

• fetch_list_of_goodnews: the server's one MCP tool, which queries NewsAPI for recent articles, has a Cohere LLM score each article's sentiment, ranks them by positive sentiment score, and returns the top results
• Zero-shot sentiment ranking via a Cohere LLM, rather than the traditional sentiment-ranking methods used by earlier projects in this space
• Runs as a local MCP server invoked through uv, integrating directly with Claude Desktop's tool-calling UI

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/VectorInstitute/mcp-goodnews.git

Requires a Cohere API key, a NewsAPI key, the Claude Desktop application, and the uv Python package manager. Edit Claude Desktop's claude_desktop_config.json, found under ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/config on Mac/Linux or %APPDATA%\Claude\config on Windows, and add an entry under mcpServers:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "Goodnews": {
      "command": "<absolute-path-to-bin>/uv",
      "args": [
        "--directory",
        "<absolute-path-to-cloned-repo>/mcp-goodnews/src/mcp_goodnews",
        "run",
        "server.py"
      ],
      "env": {
        "NEWS_API_KEY": "<newsapi-api-key>",
        "COHERE_API_KEY": "<cohere-api-key>"
      }
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop; the tool icon in the chat window should then list fetch_list_of_goodnews as an available MCP tool.

Under the hood, the flow is straightforward: your request triggers a query to NewsAPI for recent articles, the Cohere LLM analyzes the sentiment of each one, the articles are ranked by their positive sentiment score, and the top-ranking good-news stories are returned to you through Claude.

Claude Desktop users who want a quick, sentiment-ranked feed of positive news stories, by topic or in general, instead of scrolling a general news feed to find them. The project was inspired by an earlier initiative, GoodnewsFirst, which delivered positive news daily to email subscribers using traditional sentiment-ranking methods; Goodnews MCP updates that idea with modern zero-shot LLM sentiment analysis instead. It is released under the Apache 2.0 License.