Techniques are disclosed herein for providing customized news alerts for a user's contacts in a network environment via a news delivery service that includes a synchronization service for synchronizing contact information in the user's address books. Relevant newsworthy aspects can be extracted using a contact distillation service. Distilled contacts data is normalized or generalized using a data normalization service. The news delivery service also includes a news ingestion and analysis service for obtaining news feeds from various data sources. News articles or posts in the news feeds are analyzed to determine a priority score that can be used to match the articles or posts with a specific contact in the address books based at least partially on the distilled and normalized data using a news-to-contact matching and prioritization service. Matched articles and contacts can be displayed to the user via an application user interface for transmission to the contacts.