competitor-news-monitor

Competitor News Monitor

Track a declared company set and report only material, new developments with primary-source evidence. This is not a generic page-diff watcher: it applies company-news categories, source hierarchy, event deduplication, and business significance. Setup runs once in the foreground; the recurring check runs as a cronjob tick (the competitor-watch automation blueprint scaffolds this).

When to Use

• "Monitor these competitors weekly."
• "Tell me when Company X changes pricing or launches a product."
• "Create a competitor intelligence digest."
• "Track funding, partnerships, executive moves, and incidents."
• A cron tick fires for an existing competitor watch (steps 3-6).

Don't use for: one-off company research (use web_search/web_extract directly) or plain feed reading (blogwatcher).

Procedure — Setup (foreground, once)

1. Freeze the watchlist

Record canonical company names, domains, products, aliases, geography/language, event categories, cadence, audience, and materiality threshold. Done when a candidate article can be accepted or rejected consistently.

2. Build source coverage, then schedule

For each company include, where available:

1. official newsroom/blog and changelog
2. pricing/product pages
3. regulatory filings and investor relations
4. status/security pages
5. reputable trade and financial press
6. job postings as weak supporting evidence

Use blogwatcher for feeds and web_search/web_extract for pages. Write the watch contract (watchlist, categories, materiality threshold, last cutoff) to a state file under ~/.hermes/competitor-watches/<watch-slug>.json, then create the job:

cronjob(action="create",
        schedule="every monday 9am",
        prompt="Load the competitor-news-monitor skill and run the tick for the watch contract at ~/.hermes/competitor-watches/<watch-slug>.json.",
        deliver=<user's destination>)

Done when each requested event category has at least one intended primary source or a documented gap, and the job exists.