STORY can run any confirmed analysis on a schedule and email the result to the people you choose. Scheduled briefings run on Pulsar's servers, not in your browser, so the 7am brief still arrives at 7am when your laptop is closed. This guide covers how to set one up, how timeframes and recipients work, and how to manage a schedule once it's live.
Before you start: schedules run at most once a day during the public beta. Hourly schedules are coming in a later release.
How a scheduled briefing works
A schedule repeats the instruction from a confirmed plan, not the whole chat. Each run starts fresh: it works out the reporting window for that day, runs the plan against your search, writes the briefing and sends it to your recipients. Because a run can't see your earlier conversation, the brief has to make sense on its own.
Set up a schedule
Start a new chat and confirm a plan. Write your brief, select your search, date range and language with the composer filters, then click Go to plan. Review the plan and confirm it. You can't schedule from a chat without a confirmed plan.
Run it once. Check the output reads the way you want before anyone else receives it. Refine the brief now, while it's easy.
Ask STORY to schedule it. Describe the timing in plain language, for example: "Send this every weekday at 7am London time to anna@brand.com and comms-team@brand.com."
Set the reporting window. Say which period each run should cover (see the table below).
Check the confirmation. STORY shows you the schedule it's about to create. Once it's created, you'll see a schedule ID and the next run time. If you don't see both, the schedule hasn't been created.
A badge in the chat list marks every chat with an active schedule.
Reporting windows
Each schedule stores its window as a rule. At every run, the system works out the exact dates from the actual run time, including time zones and clock changes. The model never does the date maths, so a Monday brief covers the right Sunday.
Window | What you'd say | What each run covers |
Rolling window | "The 24 hours ending 07:30 London time" | The 24 hours up to 07:30 on the day of the run, in the time zone you named |
Last N days | "The last 7 days" | Seven complete days back from the run date |
Calendar period | "Yesterday", "last week", "last month" | The full calendar period in your time zone |
Put the window in the schedule, not in the brief. Avoid instructions such as "if it's Monday, cover the weekend". If you need a different window on certain days, set up a separate schedule for those days.
Recipients
Recipients are saved with the schedule and used exactly as given on every run. STORY never adds to, guesses or rebuilds the list from your chat.
Tell people yourself. STORY doesn't notify anyone when they're added to or removed from a list.
Treat the list as a disclosure decision. Briefings are built with your Pulsar permissions. A recipient receives the briefing even if they can't see the underlying search in Pulsar.
Manage a schedule
Ask STORY in the chat that owns the schedule:
List: "Show me all my schedules."
Check: "What's the status of this schedule and when did it last run successfully?"
Pause: stops delivery but keeps the schedule. Pause before switching recipients to a replacement, so nobody gets duplicates.
Revoke: ends the schedule permanently.
To change what a briefing covers or who receives it, we recommend setting up a new schedule from a new chat, then pausing the old one. Keep one schedule per chat.
Tips for reliable briefings
Make the brief self-contained: name the search, the audience, the sections you want and any word limit.
Apply filters such as country and source in the composer or plan, not as an afterthought in the brief.
Tell STORY what to do on a quiet day, for example "if fewer than three stories qualify, say so rather than padding".
Don't debug a live schedule in its chat. Start a new chat, fix the brief there and schedule again.
Troubleshooting
A briefing stopped arriving
Check when the chat was created. Chats and schedules created before 28 September 2026 are no longer supported and will be deleted on 28 October 2026. Recreate the schedule in a new chat.
Ask STORY for the schedule's status and last successful run.
Check the search still exists and you still have access to it. A deleted search or a removed membership makes the run fail.
If it still fails, recreate the schedule in a new chat and pause the old one. If the problem happens again in the new chat, contact us.
Access errors show the ID of the search that couldn't be read. Ask your Pulsar admin to add you to that search or its folder.
Need help? Message us in the app or email support@pulsarplatform.com. Include the chat link and the schedule ID.