Work
Newsroom Heatmap
One board that aggregates the news — every source, not one app
The Client
A Hong Kong media desk, and the agencies that have to be in the same weather. Every morning started the same way. Editors and account leads opened news sites, Google, a wire, a social app, a group chat. Whoever spoke first in the meeting set the day. Nobody had a shared picture of what was actually hot. They did not want another CMS. They did not want a robot that writes articles. They wanted the room to already know — from all of it, not from whoever happened to be scrolling.
The Brief
Build a heatmap, not a mill. Aggregate the day: news sites, civic wires, search trends, and social platforms, on one board. See heat, not a firehose. Cluster stories that are the same event, so “hottest” means overlap across sources, not likes on one app. A board you can leave on a desk or a wall. A human still decides what ships.
What We Built
A small newsroom aggregator. Sources land through feeds and private ingest APIs — news, wires, territory trends, social. The first social rail was X, because that is where this desk already ran a beat brief. The product is not an X dashboard. Anything with a feed or an API can sit on the same board: other social platforms, RSS, a house wire, a client’s own CMS. Items are clustered by overlap so one celebrity, one policy row, one weather event shows as one cell, not twelve headlines from twelve tabs. The screen is a kiosk. Refresh and the day is there. Nothing auto-publishes. Heat is a trigger. The magazine, the pitch, the client note still need a person.
Who it is for
Newsrooms that still start the day in twelve tabs. PR and content agencies that need to know what will hit before the client calls. In-house comms that cannot live on every platform but cannot afford to miss the spike. If the sources are news sites, a wire, Slack, Facebook, X, or a private brief — they belong on the same heatmap.
Outcome
The meeting starts from a shared picture: what is hot across news and platforms, not what one person saw in one app. X was the first social wire. The job is the aggregator — every source the desk already watches, one board. Situational awareness as a tool, not another content factory.
What we delivered
- Aggregator: news, wires, trends, and social on one board
- Connect any source with a feed or API (X was the first social rail)
- Story clustering by overlap across sources, not likes
- Hong Kong trends + civic wire
- Desk or wall kiosk
- Low crawl — trusted feeds and APIs, not a scrape of the open web
- No auto-publish; a human still decides
FAQ
Questions we get
01 Is this an X / Twitter dashboard?
No. X was the first social rail. The product is an aggregator: news sites, wires, trends, and any platform with a feed or API, on one heatmap.
02 Does it auto-publish articles?
No. Heat is a trigger. A human still decides what ships. It is situational awareness, not a content mill.
03 How do you decide what is “hot”?
Overlap across sources, not likes on one app. The same event becomes one cell instead of twelve headlines from twelve tabs.
Next case study
The Sports Association