Turn reading the news into political risk analysis
The work of a political risk analyst (or of anyone who has to keep an eye on what is happening in politics) begins as soon as they open up their phone in the morning.
If you get notifications from news sources, get email alerts, check Twitter, or read a newspaper as you’re getting ready for the day, you are doing work. It may not feel like work. Maybe you tell yourself you’re just keeping up with current events. But if any of those events will have to be discussed over a conference table or inform your organization’s plans, reading about them is an aspect of the job.
The problem is that we often do this part of the job really inefficiently.
How we usually read the news for work
To give you an example of how this often happens, I’ll give you an example from one of my first jobs, when I was responsible for covering US, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand politics for a daily publication.
My company had a morning meeting at 8:30am for analysts and outside experts to discuss what happened in their region over the past 24 hours and discuss coverage for that day. On my way to work, I’d be checking my phone for any news that I could bring up at that meeting, scrolling quickly for something that would justify my salary in front of my boss.
In the meeting, I’d be scarfing down the free pastries and coffee (still with a grad school mindset that free food is superior to any other kind of food) while reading the newspapers scattered about, checking my phone for other news, and listening to the discussion.
After the meeting, I’d head to my desk and start writing for my deadline in a few hours.
The problem with reading the news for work
At this point, about 10am, ready put fingers to keyboard, I have been reading and digesting news for about an hour and a half. That’s a large chunk of my day. Yet I have nothing written, noted, or stored, other than the sparse notes I may have taken at the meeting.
The result of all of that reading of the news exists now only in what I remember. That’s okay if we just want to be well-informed citizens, but not if we have to use that information in our jobs.
It means that I now need to go back and read it again if I want to dive deeper or share it with my colleagues, doubling my effort and time spent on it. Or - and this happens especially if it doesn’t relate to what I’m working on that morning - I move on to something else and hope to remember that news in days or weeks when it’s relevant to me.
When we read the news for work in the way that many of us do, while making coffee, or on the train, or at the beginning of the day, we are consuming information without an easy way to store it. For political risk analysts, this is an inefficient way to process the raw inputs for our job.
Maximizing reading the news
The Two Lanterns Platform gives you an easy way to store and categorize these news stories via monitors.
Perhaps you don’t need to write about the filibuster today for your work but you see a story about it that you want to remember for later. By adding an update to the filibuster monitor, you now have that story saved and connected to the question it matters for. You also, by filling out the analysis section, have memorialized why you think it’s important at that moment in time.
Monitors provide storage for the news you read. As you continue to update the monitors, the picture gets filled in. When it comes time to write a report about that issue, or make a decision based on that topic, the time you would have spent researching it again or hoping to find everything you read that you found important is saved.
The monitor has all that information, with when it happened, with links to the original sources, and your thoughts on the monitor. For my own work, that would have been 80% of the job done.
Speed up the process even more
If you want this process to go even faster, then use our email parsing function.
Send in an email to updates@twolanterns.co and we’ll create a new update for you. It will be stored on your Pending Updates page (accessible from the Monitors dashboard), ready for you to assign it to the monitor in question.
I use Twitter as a curated news feed and it’s one of the first sources I check in the morning. Tweets can be shared via email, so whenever I see one that’s relevant for an issue I’m monitoring and want to preserve, I tap the share via email button, add a bit of analysis of why I think it matters, and hit send.
Seeing a tweet that’s relevant to the question about whether the filibuster is eliminated and immediately sending it into the Two Lanterns Platform.
In a matter of seconds, I have transformed a news story into a data point and turned aimlessly scrolling into a productive bit of political analysis.
And that news story end up in my monitor quickly where it is shaping my view of events - in less time that it would take to write it all down in a notebook