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News screen

News is an early preview. The screen and the writing will change quickly as Silktide learns what is useful. What follows is how it works today.

News answers "what happened in my lately, and what should I do about it?" Silktide searches the web for coverage of your brands and topics, reads what comes back, and writes up the things that matter - with the pages it read attached, so you can check every claim.

Three tabs

The screen has three tabs, and the difference between them is the whole design.

For you is the default, and it is the product. Each story is written for your workspace: it knows which brand is yours, who you compete with, and what you are trying to win. "A competitor shipped PDF remediation" is a fact anybody can get; "your closest competitor just shipped the thing your pricing page says you are better at" is why the screen exists.

Every story carries:

  • A headline and a few paragraphs covering what happened.
  • What to do - up to three suggestions, when there are any worth making. Often there are none, which is an honest answer.
  • A relevance, drawn as filled squares out of five. This is two judgements combined: how big the event is on its own terms, and how close it lands to you. A modest announcement about your own brand can outrank a larger one about a company nobody here competes with, which is the point of scoring it for your workspace rather than in general.
  • Its sources: every page the story was written from, linked. A story makes claims about your competitors in prose a model wrote, so read the sources before you act on one.

You vs competitors is what each tracked brand published on its own sites over the same window - your own brand included. It is not another feed of stories we wrote: it is their blog posts, guides and announcements, counted from stored pages, charted per brand over time, and grouped under your workspace's topics - what they are writing about, what you should defend, and the topics nobody has claimed yet.

All pages is the raw material: every page a search turned up, stored exactly as received, whether or not anything was written from it. Most pages never become a story, and that is the point of showing them - listicles, docs pages and guides are exactly what "what are our competitors publishing" is asking about. A chart of pages per day sits above the list and always reflects the current filter.

Opening a page fills the screen the way a story does: readable text and pictures, who published it, the brands it names, its topics, and whether it fed a story. Previous and Next step through the list you were looking at, filters and all, and the original page stays one click away.

Brands in the news

Above the feed, a chart and standings table show how often each tracked brand appeared in coverage over your reporting window. Hover a row to highlight its line on the chart; click one to scope the whole screen to that brand. Everyone else scopes to stories that name nobody you track.

Filtering

Stories can be filtered by relevance, by brand, and by topic. The relevance menu offers the same five-square scale, and each row means "at least this much" rather than "exactly this", so narrowing the list can never hide the day's biggest story.

The feed opens on four squares and above - what is worth acting on. Most of what a busy workspace publishes is background by design, and an unfiltered feed buries the two stories that matter under the ninety that do not. The bottom row of the menu, one square, is everything we filed.

Brand filtering works on the brands a story actually names, found by matching your brands' names against the text - not on whatever query happened to turn the coverage up. Searching a topic and finding a piece that names your brand is the most valuable thing this screen does, and filtering by the search would hide exactly that.

Topics are assigned by the model that reads every page, so they are matters of meaning rather than wording: a piece about "search engine optimisation" files under an "SEO" topic even though the words differ. The same topic filter narrows the story feed and All pages, and it carries between them.

All pages adds filters of its own: kind, language, Published by (pages from one tracked brand's own sites, subdomains included), and Used (written into a story, passed over, or not read yet).

Search, sort, filter and export work like other Presence tables, and the view stays in the address bar, so a link opens the same list. Opening a story keeps that list: Previous and Next walk the stories you were looking at, filters and all.

Story detail and tasks

Open a story for the full write-up, an On this page rail, and the sources table. Create task on a What to do line drafts a task from the story and your workspace context. Edit the draft, then save it.

How often news arrives

News refreshes on its own, and how often depends on your plan. On the entry plan it is a weekly digest; from the next plan up it refreshes every day and tells you the day a story breaks.

A new workspace gets its first news shortly after its first scan finishes, whatever the plan's cadence - the cadence governs how often news refreshes from then on.

The stories are the same either way. A news search looks back a month whatever the cadence, so a weekly refresh finds what a daily one would have found - it just finds it up to six days later. What the faster refresh buys is knowing in time to do something about it.

A refresh searches every one of the workspace's queries, then writes up what is worth writing. Most pages are passed over for writing: a search returns listicles, press-release reprints and error pages, and writing stories about those would be the expensive mistake. They are all kept, and All pages is where to see them.

Queries

What Silktide asks the web is a list of editable queries in Settings → Queries. A workspace starts with a news query per brand and topic, plus a pages query per tracked brand that has a web address - the pages query is pinned to that brand's own domains and is what fills You vs competitors and All pages with what they publish themselves. You can reword them, remove the ones that are not earning their keep, and add your own. Each one shows how many pages it has ever found, which is how you tell.

There is a limit on how many questions one workspace can ask, the same on every plan, because every query is a paid search on every refresh. It is set high enough that most workspaces never meet it. If you want news across more ground, add a workspace: each one brings its own queries for its own brands and topics.

Being told

When a refresh writes something, Silktide notifies the people subscribed to News for that workspace: in the app, by email, and on Slack or Microsoft Teams if that workspace already posts there. The message names the stories that scored highest for you, not a raw count. A refresh that found nothing does not notify anybody, which is deliberate: an alert that says nothing happened is how a channel gets ignored.

Manage who is on that list from the Alerts control on this screen. Turn it off per person under notification preferences, as Brand news. News subscribers are a separate list from who receives the weekly strategy brief.

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