Create your own analytical news feed
As every product manager at Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and nearly every other social media app knows, people like news feeds.
It’s an easy way to consume a lot of content and can even be productive. If your work involves tracking daily events or politics, a quick scroll on your way to work can help get you up to speed faster (and more up-to-date) than reading the morning’s paper.
But there’s a catch
There are, however, downsides to relying on a news feed for your work.
It’s only productive if you’re reading information that’s relevant to your work and have curated it well enough to keep out too much noise.
Feeds only give you public information short enough to fit in a post, and rarely the deep dives that you need to track the issues that matter most.
They refresh quickly and are hard to find relevant Tweets weeks later or to remember why you bookmarked them in the first place.
For the kinds of analysis that we rely on at work, perhaps as simple as a link to an article, an explanation of why it matters, and how it affects what we’re working on, most political analysts use email, texts, or chats.
In terms of consuming information, those have more problems than a news feed.
They can get lost in all the other email, texts, and chats that we have.
They can’t connect to each other, so three email threads about the same topic stay as three separate threads.
It’s hard to find them if we need to go back and look for them weeks later.
So as political analysts, we’re left with a dilemma:
News feeds on Twitter give us general information that’s easy to consume.
Emails/texts/chats give us specific information that’s hard to consume.
Neither method is a good way to store the information for later.
Using Two Lanterns as a tailored news feed
If you use the Two Lanterns platform, you have your own news feed. If you click on the Updates tab, you will see a display of all the updates posted to the monitors you have access to, arranged chronologically.
Because these are updates to monitors, you get not only get the headline, you also see to what monitor it applies, what driver it’s connected to, how it changes the weight and level of that driver, and the analysis for the update. You can immediately click through to the link to the source material.
To make it even easier to glance through the updates for what matters, there are two dots to the side of the update. The top one indicates the change in the level of the driver caused by the update - red for higher, green for lower, and gray for no change. The bottom one indicates the change in the weight of the driver - blue for more, yellow for less, and gray for no change.
This gives you a news feed that saves you even more time. Two-color updates are the most important, followed by one-color updates, and then two grays.
It also gives you a news feed that allows a quick scan to tell you what you need to know. Rather than just a headline, it contains analysis, a forecast, and directionality. Of course, you can click through to the full update if you want.
And, finally, because the update feed is connected to the monitors, every update is saved for later. Want to remember that thing you saw about eliminating the filibuster a few weeks ago? Go to the filibuster monitor and it’ll be right there.
Updates are better with collaboration
The update feed can be useful if you’re using Two Lanterns on your own. I scroll through to remember what were the updates I was tracking on a particular day, for instance, or to see updates for multiple monitors if I’m writing on a topic that spans a few.
Its value grows exponentially when you are working on monitors with others. You’ll see every update posted to every monitor in one place, constantly updated in real time.
If, for example, you are managing a team of analysts covering dozens of issues around the globe, your updates becomes like a Twitter feed that includes internal insights or a Slack channel that is analytical and stored efficiently.
If you have hired a number of freelance or external analysts to stay on top of political issues for you, the updates feed becomes a way to keep up with what they’re sending you, without having to read a daily flurry of emails.
If you are working on a regional desk and are managing joint monitors with your colleagues, you can see easily see what is going on from their side to let you know when you may need to elevate the question or trigger a longer report.
Putting updates to work
To use this feature, simply sign up to the Two Lanterns platform (it’s free to join), create a monitor, invite others to collaborate, and start adding updates. They’ll be automatically included in the Updates page (click on Updates at the top of the screen).
If you have any questions, get in touch or join an onboarding session.