Topic Radar: How Newsletter Writers Catch Stories Before They Peak

Ask any newsletter writer where their week goes and "figuring out what to write" ranks near the top. Not the writing itself — the scanning: forty open tabs, three feed readers, X lists, and the constant low-grade anxiety that the story your audience cares about is breaking somewhere you're not looking.

The cruel part: by the time a story is obviously big, it's too late to be early. The alpha is in the acceleration — the window where a topic is starting to move but hasn't peaked. That window is exactly what Feedpik's Trending Radar is built to catch.

What the radar actually measures

The radar doesn't rank by raw popularity — popularity is a lagging indicator. Instead it compares two time windows across your sources and looks for acceleration:

• Mentions: how many articles cluster around the same story now vs. the previous window.
• Source breadth: how many distinct sources are covering it — one blog posting five times is noise; five outlets converging is signal.
• Velocity ratio: how much faster mentions are arriving compared to the baseline window.

When a topic clears the thresholds, it gets a 🔥 Heating badge. Switch between 24h, 48h, and 7d windows depending on whether you publish daily or weekly.

Because it runs on your source graph — not a global trending list — the radar surfaces what's moving in your beat. A fintech writer and an AI-infra writer with different sources get completely different radars. That's the point: global trends are everyone's ideas; your radar is yours.

From heating topic to first draft in one flow

Seeing the story early only matters if you ship the take. That's why every radar topic card has a ✍️ Draft button:

1. Click it and Feedpik creates a draft with the topic's clustered articles attached as materials.
2. Hit Generate draft and you get a structured first pass — hook, sections, takeaway — where every claim carries a citation marker like [1] pointing back to a source article.
3. Tell the built-in assistant "sharper tone" or "turn this into an X thread" and apply the revision.

The citations matter more than the prose. A generated draft you can't fact-check is a liability; a draft where every claim links to its source article is a 20-minute edit instead of a 2-hour research session.

Never watch the radar? Let it watch you

Writers don't sit in dashboards. Click Enable alerts and the radar becomes a watchdog: when a topic starts heating, you get pinged — in-app or straight to Telegram via the News Bot. The alert fires when new articles join a heating cluster, so you're not re-notified about the same story every hour.

A concrete morning workflow

For a daily tech/finance newsletter:

1. 8:00 — Open Trending Radar on the 24h window. Two topics heating.
2. 8:02 — One is in your lane. Click ✍️ Draft; five source articles attach as materials.
3. 8:05 — Generate. Read the cited draft against its sources, cut what you don't trust, add your take.
4. 8:25 — Paste into your newsletter tool. You published the take while your competitors were still scanning tabs.

The radar finds the wave. The draft workspace gets you on it. Start free, add the sources you already read, and see what's heating in your corner of the internet.