Source-First in practice means deciding whose publications you will follow before deciding what to look for in them. If you want to know how to monitor competitors without drowning in alerts, you don’t need a particular piece of software. You need a guiding question and five steps: choose sources, map their channels, follow those channels on a fixed schedule, assess every finding, and derive signals from what you have assessed.

None of this is new in principle. Intelligence doctrine describes the same work as a cycle. The UK Ministry of Defence’s keystone doctrine, JDP 2-00 (opens in a new tab), names four core functions (direction, collection, processing and dissemination) and stresses that all of them exist to meet the information requirements set by decision-makers. The five steps below are this site’s own proposal, applying the same logic to markets with one change: collection starts with senders, not search terms. The manifesto explains why that change matters.

A guiding question keeps the source list from becoming a collection

A guiding question describes the decision your monitoring is meant to support. “What are our competitors up to?” is not one: it has no end point and no test for what matters. A useful question names a market player, a topic and a time frame, and it can be answered with yes, no or “still open”.

Two to four such questions are enough to start with. Write them down, so every finding can be measured against them.

A hypothetical example runs through every step of this page. Company A sells fleet-management software to large logistics firms. It wants to know whether two competitors, B and C, will move into the small-business segment within the next twelve months. The companies, people and findings in this example are invented. It shows the method, not a real case.

Step 1: Choose sources that can speak to the question

A source is a sender: a company, an industry association, a regulator, a person in a public role. For every guiding question there are a few sources that can speak first-hand and many that only report on them. The first group goes on the list. A trade-press article about a competitor is a secondary source. The competitor’s own press release, its CEO’s LinkedIn post or its job ad is a primary source.

Four questions help with the selection:

  • Can this source say anything first-hand about the guiding question?
  • Is the sender unambiguous, meaning a company or a named person in a known role?
  • Does the source publish regularly at all?
  • Would its silence mean something?

The last question is the one people skip. If a competitor’s head of sales comments on every trade show and then says nothing on one topic, that silence is a finding too, and only someone who follows that source regularly will notice it. A keyword alert cannot report silence.

Every source on the list gets one sentence explaining why it is there.

In the hypothetical example, the list has five entries: competitor B as a company, B’s CEO, competitor C as a company, C’s head of partnerships and an industry association that publishes on small-fleet operators.

Step 2: Map the channels, because a source rarely speaks in one place

A channel is the medium through which a source publishes: a LinkedIn company page, a personal profile, a newsletter, a YouTube channel, a website’s newsroom, a blog’s RSS feed. Most sources use several, and they carry different content: press releases are polished, personal posts often come earlier, job ads reveal plans no announcement has mentioned yet.

For each source, note its channels and how to follow them:

One caveat applies. According to LinkedIn (opens in a new tab), your feed mixes posts from your network, companies you follow, sponsored content and recommended posts chosen by LinkedIn’s algorithms and editorial team. A feed is good for an overview but is not a complete record of a source; for that, the source’s own page or profile is the more reliable place to look.

In the hypothetical example, B has a LinkedIn company page, a newsroom without a feed and a careers site; B’s CEO posts on her own profile; C runs a blog with an RSS feed and a YouTube channel; the association sends a newsletter.

Step 3: Follow on a fixed schedule, not at the pace of notifications

How often you check depends on the guiding question, not on how many notifications arrive. For a question with a twelve-month horizon, one fixed weekly slot is enough. Opening every notification as it arrives lets the platforms set the pace and makes it harder to compare what a source said this week with what it said a month ago.

In that slot, every relevant finding goes into a log: date, source, channel, link and the core statement in one sentence. The log holds content, not yet signals. The separation is deliberate: whoever interprets while recording later sees only their interpretation.

In the hypothetical example, after a few weeks the log holds three entries for B: a job ad on the careers site for an account executive focused on small fleets, a post by the CEO announcing a webinar for owner-operators, and a press release on a new reseller partnership. There is no entry for C.

Step 4: Assess the sender and the claim separately

Every finding needs two judgments: how reliable has this sender been so far, and how credible is this particular claim?

Intelligence doctrine writes exactly this split into its method. The UK’s JDP 2-00 (opens in a new tab) (paragraphs 3.39 and 3.40) describes the NATO Intelligence Grading System, which it notes is sometimes called the “Admiralty Code” and is widely used. Source reliability is graded from A (completely reliable) to F (reliability cannot be judged), and credibility of the information from 1 (confirmed by other sources) to 6 (truth cannot be judged). The two must be judged separately: a reliable source can make a sincere mistake, and credible information can come from a usually unreliable source. It adds that reliability depends largely on a source’s reporting history, and credibility is best tested by corroboration.

Market monitoring doesn’t need letter-number codes. Three plain grades for each judgment are enough, as long as each has a fixed meaning and the two judgments stay separate.

For the sender:

  • established: the source has reported over a longer period, and its statements have held up so far.
  • new: the sender is clear, but there is not yet enough reporting history to judge.
  • cannot be judged: the sender is unknown or ambiguous.

For the claim:

  • confirmed: a second, independent source supports it.
  • plausible: it is internally consistent and contradicts nothing known about the source, but nobody else supports it yet.
  • open: it cannot be placed yet.

From this follows a point beyond the usual keywords-versus-sources contrast; it is this site’s inference, not the doctrine’s. A keyword hit often has no known sender and no track record, so on the doctrine’s grid its sender sits at F. The doctrine notes that an F or 6 does not render information useless; analysts must then evaluate it themselves in the context of their requirement. That work starts from scratch for every hit. A maintained source list builds a reporting history week by week, and a reliability judgment rests on that history. Following sources is how you build the basis for judging the sender.

For the second judgment, information literacy offers a principle. The ACRL Framework for Information Literacy (opens in a new tab) states that authority is constructed and contextual: information resources are evaluated based on the information need and the context in which they will be used. A competitor’s press release is authoritative on what that competitor has announced. It is not authoritative on whether the product works, because there the company is speaking about itself and in its own interest.

In the hypothetical example, the three findings come from B and its CEO, published on three channels: the careers site, the CEO’s profile and the newsroom. Both senders are clear, but Company A has only followed them for a few weeks, so each sender grade is “new”. What gets graded is the wording, not yet the interpretation. The job ad says: B is hiring an account executive for small fleets. The press release says: B has signed a reseller partnership. Both are internally consistent and contradict nothing known, but no second source supports them yet, so they are “plausible”. The post only announces that the CEO will host a webinar for owner-operators. The announcement itself says nothing about B’s plans, so as a claim bearing on the guiding question it is “open”.

Step 5: Derive signals by saying what it means for you

A signal is not the post itself but what it means for the guiding question. A single finding is rarely a signal; patterns carry meaning, such as one source over several weeks or several of its channels pointing the same way.

Richards J. Heuer’s Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, published in 1999 by the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence (opens in a new tab), offers a test: evidence is diagnostic only if it helps judge the relative likelihood of competing explanations. If an item of evidence seems consistent with all the hypotheses, it may have no diagnostic value at all (Heuer, chapter 4). So before recording a signal, ask: what would I expect to see if my reading were wrong?

In the hypothetical example, interpretation comes now. Company A reads the reseller partnership as a possible hint at the small-business segment, since the release itself states no purpose. A job ad alone could simply be a replacement hire. Only together with the announced webinar and the partnership does “new segment” become more likely than “business as usual”. The signal reads: “Three publications by B and its CEO on three channels point to B building a sales motion for small fleets. Whether this becomes a separate product is still open. Nothing from C.” C’s silence is logged as a finding in its own right.

Step 5 also includes a review every few months: which sources contributed, which stayed silent, which are missing? A source that has contributed nothing to the guiding question for a long time is removed, unless its silence is itself informative. The case studies show what this looks like in different situations.

The objection: following fewer sources means missing more

The obvious objection: important things also happen where nobody is looking, and a keyword alert casts a wider net. That’s true, and for finding where a topic comes up, or for crisis communications, broad monitoring is the right tool. The comparison is covered in detail in Sources vs. keywords.

For decisions about competitors, the objection carries less weight than it seems to. In chapter 5 of his 1999 book (opens in a new tab), Heuer summarizes experiments with experts: once an experienced analyst has the minimum information needed for an informed judgment, additional information generally does not improve the accuracy of the estimate. It does make the analyst more confident, to the point of overconfidence. Heuer writes about information in general, not about alerts. Applied to keyword hits, which is this site’s inference, a longer list of hits tends to add certainty rather than insight, and false certainty is a greater risk to a decision than a gap that is openly acknowledged.

The objection does have a point: a source list can go stale, which is why the review in step 5 belongs to the method. How Source-First relates to competitive intelligence, OSINT and media monitoring is covered in Source-First in context.

This is not legal advice. It points to texts an internal review can start from. Rules differ between jurisdictions; the examples below refer to the EU.

Source-First works only with content that sources have openly published themselves, a narrower line than the intelligence notion of publicly available information. The UK’s JDP 2-00 (opens in a new tab) (paragraph 4.7) counts anything lawfully made available to the general public, explicitly including material behind paywalls and in members-only forums. Source-First deliberately stays with what the source publishes openly on its own channels; closed groups, access controls and false identities are outside the method.

Visible does not mean free to use. According to the LinkedIn Privacy Policy (opens in a new tab), a public post can be viewed by everyone and re-shared anywhere. That describes visibility, not permitted use. Section 8.2 of the LinkedIn User Agreement (opens in a new tab) prohibits, among other things, using software, scripts or crawlers to scrape the services, using bots or other unauthorized automated methods to access them, and copying or distributing content without the owner’s consent. For the method, that means following channels with the features the platform itself provides, without your own scrapers or bots, and linking to posts in your log rather than copying them.

Posts by people are personal data. The European Commission’s guide Data protection explained (opens in a new tab) defines personal data as any information relating to an identified or identifiable living individual (Article 4(1) GDPR). Logging a CEO’s post processes such data. The Commission’s page on legal grounds (opens in a new tab) explains that processing can rest on legitimate interests only if the individual’s rights don’t override them, depending on the circumstances. Under the GDPR principles (opens in a new tab), only data necessary for the purpose may be collected (data minimization). The same page explains the duty to inform (Articles 12 to 14): when personal data is obtained from another source rather than from the individual, the individual must still be told, including where the data came from and whether it came from publicly accessible sources, subject to exceptions such as disproportionate effort. Individuals also have a right to object (opens in a new tab) to processing based on legitimate interests. Whether and how this applies to a particular log is a question for your data protection adviser.

From these boundaries, this site suggests a working stance, as an editorial view rather than legal guidance: only sources in a professional or public role, never private individuals; only what has been published; only what the guiding question needs in the log; and nothing you couldn’t openly tell the sender.

Tools: by hand, with a feed reader, or specialized

The method works by hand. For a list of five to ten sources, LinkedIn’s follow feature, a few newsletter subscriptions, a feed reader for RSS and Atom feeds, YouTube subscriptions set to “All notifications”, and a spreadsheet as the log are enough. The limits show as the list grows: channels are scattered, platform feeds follow their own logic, and websites without a feed must be visited one by one.

There are also specialized services that gather each source’s publications across channels. Every tool is bound by the same condition as the manual route: it has to respect the terms of the platforms on which the sources publish. A tool takes over the collecting. The guiding question, the assessment and the interpretation remain the team’s job.

References

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  16. European Commission: Principles of the GDPR. Undated. https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/information-business-and-organisations/principles-gdpr_en (opens in a new tab) (accessed 23 September 2026)
  17. European Commission: Dealing with requests from individuals. Undated. https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/information-business-and-organisations/dealing-requests-individuals_en (opens in a new tab) (accessed 23 September 2026)

Author: Dr. Karsten Richter, Managing Director of Picasi GmbH. Picasi GmbH publishes this website. About this website