From first company to useful alerts.
A practical guide to setting up sources, focusing your monitoring, reviewing signals, and keeping delivery reliable.
Create a dependable first watchlist
- Create your account and open the verification link sent to your email.
- Sign in and select Monitor company from Intelligence.
- Start with one or two companies whose official announcements you already understand.
- Allow the first check to build a quiet baseline. Existing headlines are stored, but they are not sent as new alerts.
- Keep automatic monitoring running. In a hosted deployment this is managed by PressWatch; local operators must also run the monitoring worker.
Reuse a company already known to PressWatch
Open Catalog to search by company, ticker, or industry. Select one or more companies, review the source summary, then choose Monitor selected.
Understand source labels
- PressWatch provided: included as a useful starting point.
- Live checked: recently returned detectable headlines.
- Verified: an administrator also reviewed the detected results.
- Mine: a private company or source you created.
- Shared: a private source another user made available to you.
Catalog reuse shares source maintenance—not your private keywords, alert history, or notification settings.
Monitor a company that is not in the catalog
- From Intelligence, choose Monitor company.
- Enter the company name and the most focused official source you can find.
- Prefer an official RSS or Atom feed. Otherwise use a press-release or investor-news page; use a general blog only when needed.
- Preview the detected headlines before saving.
- If results are too broad or missing, use Find suggestions and choose the option whose examples match the real announcement list.
- Start monitoring and confirm the source becomes healthy under Sources.
Choose what should become a signal
Monitor all company news
Leave alert topics empty when every official announcement is relevant.
Match selected topics
Add words or exact phrases such as earnings, guidance, or "chief executive officer". Choose whether any topic or every topic must appear.
Exclude predictable noise
Add terms such as webinar, careers, or podcast. Exclusions take priority over included topics.
Reuse a topic rule
Open Settings → Topic rules, save a named rule, then assign it to multiple monitors. Updating the rule re-evaluates their stored signals.
Company aliases help identify the same business under common names. They do not replace a focused source or topic rule.
Review and organize detected signals
- Intelligence shows the newest relevant events and watchlist health.
- History provides complete search, company and event-type filters, review state, archive actions, and CSV export.
- Event labels identify earnings, leadership, acquisitions, funding, partnerships, products, regulatory events, hiring, or general news.
- An Updated label means an existing announcement changed materially after PressWatch first detected it.
- Closely related announcements may be grouped into one email, while each item remains available in History.
Use Review to clear items from the unreviewed queue and Archive to remove completed items from the active workflow without deleting them.
Control when and how PressWatch contacts you
- Open Settings → Notifications.
- Enable instant signal alerts, the daily digest, or both.
- Use Send test email to confirm delivery.
- Set your timezone and digest hour under Schedule.
- Use the monitor’s own alert switch when one company should remain in History without sending instant email.
Open Deliveries to review sent or failed notifications. Delivery failures are recorded and retried automatically; check spam filtering and contact support if a test message never arrives.
Understand checks and recover from failures
Sources shows the last successful check, next scheduled check, detected item count, cadence, and latest error.
- Healthy: the source returned usable results.
- Unchanged: the publisher confirmed there was nothing new to download.
- Waiting: the first or next automatic check is pending.
- Failed: the page timed out, blocked access, changed structure, or returned no usable entries.
Use Check now once after correcting a source. Repeated manual checks will not bypass a publisher block. If the page structure changed, edit the monitor and preview a better URL or suggestion. Use Report issue when the source needs PressWatch support.
Maintain your account safely
- Change your password and review signed-in devices under Settings → Security.
- Sign out an unfamiliar or unused session.
- Download a portable copy of your monitors, signals, and delivery records under Your data.
- Account deletion is permanent. Export anything you need first.
- Review Privacy, Terms, Acceptable Use, and Service Status from the footer.
Common questions
Is detection truly real time?
No. Most company websites do not provide push events. PressWatch checks them on a considerate schedule; feeds and focused sources usually provide the fastest, most reliable results.
Why did I receive no alert after adding a company?
The first check is intentionally quiet. Later items must also match your rules and notification preferences.
Why do I see an item in History but not an email?
The monitor may have instant email disabled, the item may have been grouped with a related alert, or delivery may have failed. Check Deliveries.
Where can I get help?
Use Report issue for a monitored source or the contact form for account, coverage, or pilot questions.