TV news mention tracker for your brand and competitors

Build me an agent workflow that tracks US TV news mentions of our brand and our two biggest competitors so our comms team finally has a signal for earned-media TV hits. Trigger: cron, every 2 hours during US business hours (9am to 7pm Eastern, Monday through Friday).

Inputs the workflow should accept: three brand names (OURBRAND, COMPETITOR1, COMPETITOR2), the Slack channel id for #pr-tv, and the Notion database id for the TV Mentions archive.

On each run, the agent should call GDELT's Search TV News Clips (TV 2.0) operation with a query like (OURBRAND OR COMPETITOR1 OR COMPETITOR2), scoped to the last 2 hours, across major US national news stations (CNN, FOXNEWS, MSNBC, CNBC, BLOOMBERG, BBCAMERICA, ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS). Important: set last24=yes on the GDELT call because the TV API excludes the last 24 hours of broadcasts by default and we want the freshest captions available. Request the clip URL, station, show name, air date, and the matching captioning snippet for each hit.

For each returned clip, the agent should classify it: which brand it is about (one of the three, or multiple), sentiment (positive / neutral / negative), and whether it is a substantive segment (the brand is discussed for at least a sentence or two of meaningful context) versus a passing mention (single name-drop in an unrelated segment). The agent should use the captioning snippet plus the surrounding anchor context to make this call.

For every substantive hit, post a message to the configured Slack channel using Slack's Send a Message operation. The message should include: which brand it is about, the station and show, the air date and time, the anchor or context as a short lead-in, the matching sentence-level quote from the captions, the classified sentiment, and a link to the Internet Archive clip URL so a teammate can watch the segment in one click. Format it cleanly so it scans well in Slack.

For every clip the run returns (substantive or not), create one page in the Notion TV Mentions database using Notion's Create a Page operation. Fill in all parsed fields: brand, station, show, air date, sentiment, substantive vs passing, captioning quote, and clip URL. This gives the team a searchable archive they can pull from for press kits, board decks, and quarterly reporting.

Deduplicate by clip ID across runs so repeated executions never double-post the same segment to Slack or create duplicate Notion pages. The clip's unique URL from GDELT is fine as the dedupe key.

If no clips come back on a run, just exit quietly. No empty Slack messages.

Additional information

What does this prompt do?

Scans US cable and broadcast news closed captions every two hours during business hours for your brand and competitor names.
Filters out passing mentions and only alerts on substantive segments, tagged by station, anchor context, and sentiment.
Posts each real hit to a Slack channel with the quoted sentence and a link to watch the clip.
Logs every clip to a Notion database so PR has a clean archive for press kits, board decks, and quarterly reviews.
Deduplicates by clip ID so repeated runs never double post the same segment.

What do I need to use this?

A list of three brand or company names to monitor (yours plus two competitors).
A Slack workspace and the channel you want TV alerts to land in, such as #pr-tv.
A Notion workspace with a database for TV mentions, with columns for brand, station, date, sentiment, quote, and clip link.
No GDELT account is needed. The TV news data is free and public.

How can I customize it?

Swap in your own brand and competitor names, or expand the list to track an entire industry.
Change the schedule to run more often during a launch week, or limit it to working hours in your timezone.
Tighten or loosen the filter for substantive coverage, for example only alerting on segments longer than thirty seconds.
Add more stations to the watch list, or narrow it to just the networks your audience actually watches.
Route different brands to different Slack channels, or copy negative-sentiment clips to a separate crisis channel.

Frequently asked questions

Which TV channels does this actually cover?

Major US cable and broadcast news, including CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC, Bloomberg, BBC America, and the national feeds of ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS. Coverage comes from the Internet Archive's TV News project, which captions broadcasts in near real time.

How quickly will I see a mention after it airs?

The captioning data lags live broadcasts by about 24 hours, so you should think of this as next-day earned-media monitoring rather than a live alert. The workflow is set up to look back across that window so nothing gets missed.

Will I get a flood of alerts every time my brand is said once in passing?

No. An agent reviews each clip and only forwards segments that are actually about your brand or competitors. Single name-drops in unrelated segments stay out of Slack but still get logged to Notion if you want them.

Can I include print or online news in the same workflow?

This prompt focuses on TV because that signal is genuinely hard to get elsewhere. You can run a separate workflow for web and social monitoring, or extend this one to also search online articles in the same window.

Do I need a paid GDELT plan or API key?

No. GDELT is a free public news data project. You only need your Slack and Notion accounts connected.