Explainer · Updated
What is narrative intelligence?
Narrative intelligence is knowing which version of a story is taking hold, who is carrying it, how fast it is moving and what the record says about it. It reads how a story is told, not how often a name is mentioned.
A working definition.
A narrative is the version of events that people come to believe: about a policy, a company, a contract or a country. Narrative intelligence means tracking those versions as they form. It asks questions a single article or a mention count cannot answer: how many separate newsrooms are telling this story, are they telling the same one, which details does every report agree on, which are contested, who is carrying each version, and does the record back it up.
It sits between two older practices. Media monitoring collects every mention of a name so a team can see its coverage. Open-source intelligence (OSINT) investigates a question using any public material. Narrative intelligence is deeper than monitoring and more focused than OSINT: it reads how events are told, at the scale of whole countries, and sets what is said beside the evidence.
What it actually involves.
Most narrative intelligence work comes down to six steps:
- Collect.
- Pull reports from a known, vetted set of sources, so you can say exactly what was read and what was not.
- Group.
- Put the reports about one event together as one story, even when they use different words, languages or names for the same people and places.
- Separate copies from voices.
- Many articles are the same wire report reprinted. Counting them as separate sources overstates how widely something is believed.
- Read the versions.
- Find the claim at the center of the story, what each report emphasizes and where it stands on that claim, and whether outlets fall into distinct groups by lean, region or country.
- Check the record.
- Set each claim beside the documents, records and data that confirm or contradict it.
- Keep the trail.
- Every count and score should link back to the reports and records behind it, so anyone can check the reading.
Why it matters now.
A false claim takes a minute to make and an afternoon to check. The World Economic Forum ranks misinformation and disinformation among the top global risks for the next two years. Decisions about money, policy and reputation are made on whichever version of a story sets first, so the teams who answer for those decisions need to see a narrative while it is still forming, not after.
Who uses it.
Teams who have to answer for what is being said: government press and policy offices, regulators, finance departments and auditors, corporate affairs and risk teams, campaigns and policy consultancies, newsrooms and fact-checking desks, and security and compliance analysts.
What it is not.
Narrative intelligence is not fact-checking, though fact-checkers use it, and it is not a verdict machine. It shows what is reported, what is agreed, what is disputed and what the record says; deciding what is true stays with a person. It is also not surveillance of individuals: done properly, it reads published and lawfully held material, not private messages.
Questions.
- Is narrative intelligence the same as media monitoring?
- No. Media monitoring collects mentions of a name or topic. Narrative intelligence groups reports by event, shows which versions exist and who carries each one, and checks them against the record.
- Is narrative intelligence a kind of OSINT?
- It is a focused part of it. OSINT uses any public source to investigate a question; narrative intelligence follows how stories are told at scale and what the evidence says about them.
- Does narrative intelligence tell you what is true?
- No. It tells you who is saying what, what every report agrees on, what is still disputed, and what the record shows. Deciding what is true stays with a person.
- Is narrative intelligence only about social media?
- No. Some tools in the category read mostly social platforms. Alethman starts from national news coverage, which carries more weight with regulators, courts, investors and other journalists, and adds the records that settle a claim.
Where Alethman fits.
Alethman runs these six steps on national news from the United States, India and more than a dozen other countries, and links every number to its sources.