Business News Monitor

Business News Monitor

You scan the domain your agent operates in for material shifts that affect the agent's active work — competitor moves, regulatory changes, technology breakthroughs, new entrants, audience-behavior shifts. Output goes to a structured log that other skills (idea-grooming re-grill, planning convos) can read.

This is not a news aggregator. The output isn't "here are the day's headlines." It's "here are the 1-3 things in your domain that materially changed and why you care."

Inputs (from agent config)

Read your agent's config for the domain overlay:

• domains: [<list>] — e.g. [financial-newsletters, retail-investor-tools] for fingers, [perfumery, scent-design] for Kevin's perfumer agent
• news_sources: [<{name, url, kind}>] — RSS feeds, subreddit URLs, newsletter archives, GitHub trending paths. Each entry has a kind (rss / html / subreddit / hn / etc.) so you know how to parse.
• competitors: [<list>] — known incumbents and direct comparables to track explicitly
• keywords_critical: [<list>] — phrases that should trigger an alert if they appear (e.g. "Mailchimp acquisition" for fingers, "Firmenich layoffs" for perfumer)
• keywords_relevant: [<list>] — phrases that should be surfaced if they appear (broader, lower bar)
• output_path: <path> — where the daily log gets written (typically <vault>/Operating System/News Monitor/<YYYY-MM-DD>.md or similar)

If domain config is missing, surface the gap to the operator and don't silently produce a generic scan.

Output rubric

Every run produces ONE markdown file at <output_path>/<YYYY-MM-DD>.md with this shape:

---
date: YYYY-MM-DD
domains: [<from config>]
sources_scanned: <N>
items_seen: <N>
items_kept: <N>
materiality_threshold: medium
---

# Domain news monitor — <date>

## Material shifts (the only section the operator NEEDS to read)

For each material item (cap at 5 — discipline matters):

### <One-line headline of the shift>

- **What changed:** 1-2 sentences, plain language
- **Why we care:** how it affects active work / pursue ideas / current strategy
- **Source:** <link>, <publication>, <date>
- **Confidence:** high | medium | low (how solid the signal is)
- **Suggested action:** flag a re-grill on idea X / update positioning / no action / investigate further

## Surface (interesting, not material)

Bullet list. 3-10 items. Headlines + 1-line takeaway each. No expansion. These are FYI, not action triggers.

## Quiet today

If the scan found nothing material, say so explicitly. "Quiet today" is a valid output. Do NOT manufacture materiality to fill the section.

## Sources scanned

Inline list of every source visited + count of items pulled. Lets the operator audit coverage.

Materiality test

For every candidate item, ask:

1. Does it affect a current pursue idea or active work? If yes → material.
2. Does it match a keywords_critical keyword? If yes → material.
3. Does it represent a new competitor entering the space? If yes → material.
4. Does it represent a regulatory or platform change (Apple, Mailchimp, Anthropic, etc.) that touches our stack? If yes → material.
5. Does it surface a net-new opportunity (new audience, new tech enabling X, new market emerging)? If yes → material.

Otherwise → surface (not material).

Hard cap: 5 material items per day. If the day genuinely has more than 5 material shifts, that's worth a Telegram alert to the operator separately — drop the rest into surface.

Anti-patterns (don't do)

• Don't surface yesterday's news. Each item must be net-new since the last run.
• Don't paraphrase headlines. Quote the source headline verbatim, then add the "what changed" interpretation.
• Don't make predictions. ("This will lead to X" is out of scope.) Stick to what changed and why we care.
• Don't pad. If only 2 things are material, output 2 items. Empty padding is noise.
• Don't paste raw source content. Parse, summarize, link. The output should be skimmable in 60 seconds.

Cron pattern

Suggested cadence per domain:

• Fast-moving domains (financial markets, AI, crypto): daily, weekday morning before the operator's first session
• Slow-moving domains (perfumery, brand strategy, niche B2B): 2x/week

Cadence lives in the agent's cron config, not here. This skill just defines how the scan runs once invoked.

Cross-skill links

• Material items with Suggested action: flag a re-grill on idea X should trigger idea-grooming to re-run on that idea
• The output log is also read by multi-perspective-grilling when generating new perspectives on existing strategy