Client News monitoring

Goal: keep an eye on what's being written about a client's business in the press — local and national news — without leaving FrameCourier.

Client News is entirely internal. Headlines are only ever visible to your team on the admin side — nothing here is shown to the client or appears anywhere in the client portal.

What it monitors

For each monitored client, FrameCourier searches Google News for the client's business name together with their city and state (taken from the client record) and keeps the matching headlines. A client with no city and no state on file can't be monitored — add a location first.

After the first fill, the search runs once a night, not in real time, so a fresh story can take up to about a day to appear. Each refresh keeps up to 15 of the most recent headlines and replaces the previous batch.

New clients: on by default

Monitoring is switched on automatically for every client you create, and the first batch of headlines is fetched within a few minutes of adding the client (rather than waiting for that night's check). If the new client has no city or state on file yet, nothing is fetched until you add a location and the nightly check picks it up.

Turning it on for an older client

Clients created before this became the default are left as they were. To start monitoring one:

  1. Open the client from Clients and go to their News tab.
  2. Check Monitor local & national news for this client and click Save.
  3. The first headlines appear after the next nightly check. Until then the tab shows a "no headlines yet" note; the Last checked time beside the form tells you when the monitor last ran.

To stop monitoring a client, clear that same checkbox and save — the cached headlines are removed from the dashboard Client News tab. Pinned headlines are kept.

Excluding noise

The Exclude terms box on the same tab takes a comma-separated list. Any headline whose title or news source contains one of your terms is dropped — useful for filtering out a similarly named business, routine listings, or a topic you don't care about (for example obituary, wedding announcement, sports). Exclude terms are re-applied on every nightly refresh.

Pinning headlines

Each headline in the Recent headlines list has a Pin button. Pinned headlines move to a Pinned section at the top of the tab and survive the nightly refresh — the automatic list churns as new stories come in, but pins stay until you remove them with Unpin. You can also attach a short note to a pinned headline (why it matters, who to tell) and save it alongside the pin.

AI summary on pinned headlines

When you pin a headline, FrameCourier queues a short AI summary — one or two sentences — that appears under the headline in the Pinned section once it's ready. The summary is written from the headline and its source only: Google News links go through a redirect that a machine can't read the article body from, so Milo doesn't try to. Treat it as a quick "what is this probably about," not a substitute for opening the story.

A Regenerate link next to the summary requests a fresh one if the first pass was thin or off. The same pinned headlines and their summaries are also fed into project Ask Milo on the team side, so Milo can answer questions about what's happening with the client in the news.

The dashboard Client News tab

Once monitoring is in use, a Client News tab can be shown on the company dashboard — it lists the single most recent headline for each monitored client, so the whole team gets a quick daily glance without opening every client in turn. Switch the tab on from Settings → Dashboard; see The company dashboard.

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