A lightweight QA routine that keeps monitoring accurate, trusted, and low-noise.
Track what you miss
Create a missed-coverage log for any story you expected to see but did not. Over a month, patterns will show which sources or queries need to change.
Missed coverage is often a bigger risk than noisy coverage, so capture it systematically.
Audit false positives
Log irrelevant alerts and identify the keyword collisions that caused them. Each collision should result in a new exclusion or refined query.
Treat exclusions as a living list. Noise grows if exclusions are never updated.
Verify tagging consistency
Randomly sample coverage each week and check whether it is tagged correctly for topic, sentiment, and outlet tier.
Inconsistent tagging undermines reporting accuracy and erodes confidence in dashboards.
Review sources quarterly
Remove sources that never appear in meaningful coverage and add sources that repeatedly influence stakeholders.
Quarterly reviews prevent a slow creep toward unmanageable feeds.