Building a Morning News Brief: A Step-by-Step Guide for PR Teams
A morning news brief is a daily summary of relevant coverage sent to your client before their first meeting of the day. Done well, it positions your team as indispensable. Done poorly, or not at all, and you are just another vendor.
What Goes in a Morning Brief
A morning brief is not a comprehensive coverage report. It is a curated selection of the most important articles from the past 24 hours. Include articles about the client, their competitors, their industry, and any breaking news that could affect their business. Five to ten articles is usually the right range. More than that and it stops being a brief.
The 6:30 AM Workflow
The best morning briefs land in the client's inbox by 7:30 AM. That means someone on your team needs to be scanning by 6:30. Here is a workflow that works:
6:30 AM — Open your monitoring alerts and key publications. Scan headlines. Open anything relevant in Safari tabs.
6:45 AM — Batch-clip all relevant articles. With Manny, this means opening articles in tabs and using batch fetch to clip them all to the Doghouse at once.
7:00 AM — Review clips in the Doghouse. Add a one-line cover note to each explaining why it matters to the client. Tag them for the brief.
7:15 AM — Export the tagged clips into a formatted brief. A clean summary at the top, followed by the articles with your notes.
7:30 AM — Send. Done before your first coffee gets cold.
Consistency Is the Product
A morning brief that arrives every single day at the same time builds trust. A brief that arrives some days and not others erodes it. The key is making the process fast enough that it is sustainable. If it takes 90 minutes, someone will eventually stop doing it. If it takes 30 minutes, it becomes a habit.
Tools That Help
You need a fast clipping tool, a way to organize and tag clips, and a way to export them into a formatted document or email. Manny's Doghouse handles all three. Clip to the Doghouse, add notes, export as a brief. The whole process stays inside one app.