01
A journalist covering housing
Watches: Chris Bishop, “housing affordability,” Stuff, RNZ.
OpenBrief Pro
·
Now in private beta
Get told when the political conversation shifts on what you care about.
Watchlists for MPs, topics, and sources. A daily email tracking the rolling 7-day picture against a 4-week baseline — not overnight predictions, just measured week-on-week shifts. 12 weeks of history so you can see how the story built.
openbrief.co.nz/pro · Today’s Brief
PRO
Today’s Brief · built Tue, 5 May 09:12 NZST
This week’s signals: what crossed the threshold against the 4-week baseline.
3 narratives accelerating
2 fading
1 framing shift
2 watchlist moved
Cost of Living Crisis
Open ↗
- +124%vol · 7d
- neutral → crisisframing
- press leads 2dlead/lag
Why this matters. Urgency framing supports intervention narratives and is being adopted by opposition actors.
Term drift · Three Strikes
Open ↗
Apr 14three strikes
→
Apr 28repeat-offender bill
→
May 03tough-on-crime law
Why this matters. Two opposition MPs have adopted the new phrasing this week. Coverage is leading discourse.
Three example watchlists
Pick what you watch — we tell you when it moves.
02
A comms lead at a policy shop
Watches: cost of living, coalition tension, opposition MPs.
03
An engaged citizen in Botany
Watches: their local MP, “three strikes,” “rates.”
Where OpenBrief Pro is today. Watchlists, on-page alerts and the 12-week archive are live on /pro/dashboard. The watchlist digest is opt-in — choose daily or weekly in account settings, with per-item sensitivity tuning so you can mute a noisy MP without muting the topic. One-click unsubscribe in every email. We’d rather ship no alert than the wrong one.
How OpenBrief Pro detects movement
Behind every alert: a measurable threshold, a sourced signal, and a one-click way to tell us we got it wrong.
Anomaly
A topic, MP, or source breaks out against its own trailing baseline. Minimum base counts so a quiet topic going from 0.8 mentions to 12 doesn’t fire as a 1500% spike. You can tune sensitivity per watchlist item.
Framing & alias drift
The phrasing on a tracked topic moves — new alias adopted, stance distribution tilts critical, two MPs use the new term in the same week. We log the term chain so you can see how the language shifted, with sources.
Lead-lag flip
Cross-corpus correlation between commentary and mainstream press flips on a tracked topic. We use Pearson r over a 12-week window with a minimum r threshold so noisy correlations don’t fire.
New record
A tracked MP files a new pecuniary entry, gives a Hansard speech on a tracked topic, or attends a ministerial diary meeting. A tracked source publishes new coverage on a tracked keyword. No threshold — just “something new in the public record on what you watch.”
Built for
Built for people who can’t read every outlet every day.
Journalists
Get notified when a story is breaking in discourse before it hits the mainstream press.
Watchlists on MPs and beats. Daily email tracking the rolling 7-day shifts against a 4-week baseline. Lead-lag between commentary and press so you can see a story building.
Policy analysts
Track narrative risk around live policy. Get alerted when framing shifts on the topics you own.
Alias-drift detection on a topic. First-use stamps when an MP adopts a new phrase. Every claim links back to the source.
Comms teams
Watch the topics, MPs, and outlets that matter to your client. Get told when something moves.
Per-outlet coverage spikes. Stance and framing shifts. A weekly summary you can paste into a client report.
Researchers
Set watchlists on long-running topics. Get a weekly digest of what changed, with every claim sourced.
12 weeks of history on OpenBrief Pro; the full archive on Enterprise. Pearson-r lead-lag, topic co-occurrence, alias chains. API and MCP access on Enterprise.
A worked example · alert that fired April 27
This is the kind of shift OpenBrief Pro alerts you to.
A subscriber watching “cost of living” got told the day the framing shifted — not the day mainstream press caught up.
Apr 14
cost of living
→
Apr 28
cost of living crisis
→
May 03
economic mismanagement
The framing-drift detector fired on April 27. Anyone with “cost of living” on their watchlist would have seen the shift surfaced on the dashboard that morning — six days before the third term landed in mainstream coverage.
Pricing
Built to be cheap enough that you don’t think twice.
Free
$0
forever
See what’s happening now.
- Browse all MPs, topics, and sources
- Full dossiers and public briefings
- This week and last week of coverage
Recommended
OpenBrief Pro
$20
per month
Get told when something moves.
- Watchlists and alerts
- Watchlists for MPs, topics, and sources
- Daily email digest — rolling 7-day shifts on what you watch
- Anomaly, framing-shift, and lead-lag alerts (weekly windows vs 4-week baseline)
- 12 weeks of history
- Look back across the full archive on any topic, MP, or source
- See how a story built, not just where it is now
- Deep analysis tools
- Press × discourse lead-lag, with Pearson correlation
- Topic co-occurrence graph
- Full radio and podcast clip library with speaker attribution
- Reach-weighted attention across sources
Enterprise
Get in touch
For newsrooms, agencies, and research teams.
- Multiple seats
- Unlimited historical archive (vs 12 weeks on Pro)
- API and MCP access
- Priority data updates
- Everything in Pro
Methodology
Designed to be checked, not trusted.
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Every insight traces back to a source.
Each claim, sparkline, and shift detection links to the underlying records. We do not paraphrase quietly.
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No predictive scoring or editorial bias.
We do not score politicians or assign sympathies. The system reports what is happening in the conversation, not what it thinks of it.
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Derived from public records and verifiable sources.
Hansard, Beehive press releases, RSS feeds from 14 outlets, and public discourse on identifiable platforms. No private data, no scraping behind paywalls.
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LLM output is constrained.
Generated text is capped at two sentences, anchored to specific data points you can click through, and one-click correctable from every page it appears on.