Issues Tracking Report
You already know which issues you are watching. This report tells you how each one is moving: escalating, sustaining, fading, or dormant, who is driving it, and whether any two are starting to merge into a single narrative.
What it does
Where an early-warning scan hunts for new problems, this report keeps an honest eye on the ones you have already chosen to track. You define a portfolio of named issues, each with the distinctive terms that identify it in coverage. The report then measures every issue against the same period last time and answers one strategic question for each: what is its current trajectory, who is carrying it, how does it intersect with your other issues, and is it getting worse, holding steady, or settling down. Crucially, it also looks across the portfolio for issues appearing in the same articles, the early sign that two separate problems are converging into one harder-to-manage story.
The questions it answers
- For each issue we track, is it escalating, sustaining, fading, or going dormant?
- Which one or two issues warrant the most attention this period?
- Who is driving each issue, and are new voices entering or familiar ones going quiet?
- Is the language of an issue stable, evolving, or being replaced by new framing?
- Are any two of our issues starting to be reported together, converging into a single narrative?
What's in the report
The report opens with a portfolio assessment: how many issues sit in each trajectory band, which deserve attention now, whether any convergence is forming, and a one-line verdict on the portfolio overall.
- A portfolio scoreboard ranking every issue by volume, with period-over-period change in volume and sentiment, intensity, social engagement, top-tier coverage, and a trajectory label, with escalating and dormant issues highlighted.
- A detailed section per issue: a short verdict, a volume-and-sentiment trajectory chart, the journalists and outlets driving it labelled as new, sustained, or fading voices, and the activist groups, regulators, and stakeholders appearing in its coverage.
- A narrative-evolution view per issue, placing this period's dominant phrases beside last period's, with a plain note on whether the language is stable, evolving, or replaced.
- Geographic distribution for each issue, showing whether it is concentrated, regionally clustered, or globally spread, and whether that spread is widening.
- A cross-issue co-mention matrix that names any pair of issues now appearing together far more than before.
- A list of issues that may be resolved, flagged as dormant, with a recommendation to keep tracking lightly or de-list, and a reminder to reactivate on any future signal.
Every issue is benchmarked against the equivalent prior period, and findings are cited back to source coverage.
Who it's for
This is for teams running an ongoing watching brief rather than reacting to a single event: in-house communications and corporate affairs functions managing a standing risk register, public-sector and government communicators tracking policy-sensitive issues, and agencies maintaining issue portfolios across multiple clients. It suits the regular cadence report that lands on a comms director's desk, or in front of the board, every fortnight or month.
Why Truescope Analyst
The manual way is a spreadsheet that someone updates by hand each cycle, re-counting coverage per issue, eyeballing whether tone has shifted, and almost never finding the time to check whether issues are colliding. It is laborious, it drifts as the person doing it changes, and the cross-issue view, the most valuable part, is usually the first thing dropped. A general AI tool cannot stand in: it has no access to your tracked coverage, cannot compare this period against the last across every outlet, and cannot build a co-mention matrix from articles it has never seen. Analyst applies the same trajectory rules to every issue every cycle, so the read is consistent rather than dependent on who ran it, surfaces convergence you would not spot issue by issue, cites each finding back to coverage, and produces the whole portfolio in minutes. It is part of your subscription, so the report is repeatable on demand and available to the whole team.
Frequently asked questions
How many issues can I track, and how do I define them?
You can track up to 12 issues in one report; beyond that the cross-issue matrix becomes unreadable. Each issue needs three to eight distinctive identifying terms. Vague concepts like "general criticism" cannot be tracked, so the report will ask you to sharpen any loose definitions before it runs.
What time periods does it cover and compare against?
It works across up to the last 13 months of coverage in your Truescope inbox, or the last 90 days for global data not already matched to your workspace. Each issue is compared against the immediately preceding period of equal length, so change is always measured like for like.
What does it mean when an issue is marked dormant?
Dormant means coverage has fallen to a handful of items and is trending toward zero. The report will suggest light-touch tracking or de-listing, but it is explicit that quiet coverage does not mean the underlying matter is resolved; issues often go quiet in the press while continuing in slower legal or regulatory channels, so any dormant issue should be reactivated on any fresh signal.
