How do you filter your news?

I generally look at news and information in a couple of tiers:

1: Primary Sources

It should go without saying that you need to listen to every earnings call (or read the transcripts), attend or tune into investor days, and listen to all the Q&A with the management teams of the companies you cover. The companies you cover also all have IR & PR pages, which provide earnings and other SEC filings, press releases, and lots of fluffy PR stuff (which tends to be less important). It's worth scanning these pages frequently. The information may not always be useful in crafting an investment thesis or note about the company, but as a research analyst it's your job to be up to date with everything these companies do and say, so you don't want to miss anything here.

2: Industry Specific News Sources

Chances are you're covering a group of companies that operate within a certain industry vertical, or at least within a couple of closely related ones. There are often entire websites / publications devoted to covering news in that space. It's up to you to gauge the credibility / quality of what's being reported by those sources, but subscribing to a daily email from these kinds of things (or just visiting the website once or twice a day and scrolling through) can be useful to scan industry relevant headlines in 5-10 mins at the beginning or end of each day. It's then up to you to dig more into things you find interesting or noteworthy. I save the links to useful articles and delete the emails so my inbox is cleaner.

3. Firm-Provided News Aggregators

If you have access to software such as Bloomberg, for example, you can customize your news feed to include certain keywords (e.g. your company's products, C-suite personnel, factory sites, etc.), company names, tickers, markets, etc. to create a relevant flow of information for your sector or coverage group. Not everyone gets Bloomberg depending on your group / firm, so try to learn how to use these features on whatever you have access to.

4. What Everyone Else Reads

You have to spend some time reading, at a bare minimum, the WSJ, and I personally read the FT (Financial Times) as well. This helps keep you up to date with what's going on in the broader market, as it is easy to focus almost exclusively on your companies. A good analyst is able to take their industry specialization and frame it with the backdrop of everything else that's happening in the market and around the world. You can save articles on these bigger publications if you have an account, and you can create semi-customizable streams of articles if you spend some time figuring it out.

5. Other Sources

There are actually some pretty good accounts on Twitter & other "non-official" media platforms where you can find content that is not widely reported on or will take some time to hit the mainstream news reels. Obviously, exercise caution when you use these (don't get into arguments with people you disagree with, don't disclose MNPI or your firm's views on things, etc.). I think being a net consumer on some media sites can provide you with a lot of input as to how the market is thinking about certain things, companies, and events. You also can't take a tweet and a link to an article, for example, at its face value, so additional verification is often needed with information you dig up.

Framing it all

Remember, the market is looking to YOU to synthesize the mosaic of news and world full of current events to provide a view on the stocks and industries you cover. With everything you read, ask yourself questions like "how will this affect the companies I cover," "is this relevant," "will the market think this is relevant," etc. Yes, ER analysts are frequently wrong and focus a lot on the short-term, but we do a job the rest of the street expects and uses in a certain way.

Hope this helps OP & others who are in a similar boat.