Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on computer storage media, for automatic generation of news digests. One of the methods includes accessing a database storing news snapshots, each snapshot identifying a predetermined quantity of top news stories for a period of time, each of the top news stories in a particular snapshot for a particular period of time ranked according to an importance score that measures the importance of the news story relative to other news stories for the particular period of time, determining a digest time period, determining, for the digest time period, all of the snapshots with periods of time included in the digest time period, generating, from the top news stories in the determined snapshots, a digest ranking of digest news stories, and providing, to a user device, data identifying one or more of the digest news stories for presentation according to the digest ranking.