Katrina Schollenberger, US Head of Live News, on how Storycue became the tool her team turns to when the news goes quiet and how it never lets them down
3x faster story discovery with Storycue
20+Story Sources Monitored
3xFaster Story Discovery
Real-timeBreaking Opportunity Alerts
The Challenge
Every newsroom knows the feeling. The big stories have been covered, the breaking news has gone quiet, and Google Trends is cycling through the same handful of topics it showed an hour ago. For a team with output targets and an audience expecting fresh content, that moment of stillness is a genuine problem.
For Katrina Schollenberger, US Head of Live News at Daily Mail US, slow news days were not about a lack of stories. They were about the limits of the tools available to find them. When the main feed ran dry, there was no reliable next step.
The news does not actually stop on quiet days. The question is whether your tools can still see it.
The Solution
Storycue monitors 20+ customisable sources continuously, including Instagram accounts, subreddits, YouTube channels, X and competitor sites alongside traditional publishers. On the days when Google Trends has nothing new to offer, those sources are still generating signals. Storycue picks them up, analyses the data and uses an opportunity score to surface the stories most likely to resonate with a Daily Mail US audience specifically.
The shift happened on one of those quiet days. Katrina had exhausted Google Trends and had nothing left to pitch. She opened Storycue and found a full set of stories her audience would want, surfaced from sources her existing tools were not watching at all. From that point on, checking it hourly became standard practice.
Why it keeps delivering when everything else goes quiet:
Monitors 20+ source types simultaneously. Instagram accounts, subreddits, YouTube channels, X, competitors and niche publishers, all tracked in one place so nothing slips through on a quiet day
Instant alerts when something breaks. As soon as a tracked source picks up momentum, Storycue flags it so the team can move before it hits the mainstream
Every story scored by opportunity. Storycue analyses the data across all sources and assigns each story an opportunity score, so on a quieter day the team always knows which stories are worth pursuing first for their specific audience
Ready to act on immediately. Headline suggestions, keywords and internal links mean a quiet day story can be pitched and published without delay
On a slow news day, when I had exhausted everything Google Trends had to offer, Storycue was still finding stories. That was the moment I realised it was something different. Now I check it every hour.
The Impact
Katrina now checks Storycue every hour on every shift. The opportunity score means she never has to guess which stories to prioritise. On the quietest days, she consistently finds at least five pitchable stories. The slow news day has not disappeared, but it has stopped being a problem.
The habit spread through the team without any prompt. Once colleagues saw that Storycue kept delivering on the days when nothing else did, it became part of how everyone worked.
About Daily Mail US
Daily Mail US is the American digital operation of the Daily Mail, one of the world’s most-read English-language news websites. With a fast-moving editorial team covering breaking news, entertainment, politics and culture across the US, maintaining a consistent output regardless of the news cycle is central to how they serve their audience.
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- Katrina Schollenberger, US Head of Live News, Daily Mail US
