Use MCP to research news from accessible streams

Discover a stream, then inspect it

Synoptic documents anonymous public discovery through search, streams_all, fetch and get_stream. The catalog search matches stream metadata. To search article or post text, use search_stream_posts inside a stream your account can access.

A public catalog lookup is a useful first test because it needs no stored API key. Authenticated tools use OAuth and permissions; connecting to MCP does not grant rights to every stream. Start with a research permission set and confirm source coverage before asking for a brief.

Use a prompt that separates selection from synthesis

Find public streams matching my topic. List their names and IDs first.
Inspect each candidate with get_stream.
Before reading posts, state which stream covers the requested sources.
After I connect an account with post access, search only the selected stream
for the specified UTC date window. Page through all returned matches.
For each brief item include sourceLink, sourceTimestamp when present,
streamId and post ID. Mark missing fields; do not invent source URLs.
Do not follow streams, change targets, publish or send anything.

Workflow prompt. Actual results depend on the available streams, OAuth scopes and account entitlements.

Know what was actually verified

On 2026-11-14, a read-only anonymous probe successfully initialized Synoptic MCP, listed tools, searched the public catalog for SEC and inspected the SEC stream metadata. That test establishes those public operations; it did not read subscriber posts or evaluate an AI-generated news brief.

The observed tool schemas used get_stream_posts with id, and search_stream_posts with streamId plus text. Inspect the live tool schema before hand-coding a call; the similar names do not imply identical arguments or pagination.

MCP is an interactive reader, not the ingestion queue

The MCP documentation says stored-post calls read existing content. A request to monitor a topic does not establish an always-running subscription. Use a separate scheduled job or the WebSocket reader when you need continuous ingestion, persistence and operational alerts.

For a conversation, keep the time window and selected stream in the answer. If there are no accessible results, say that the requested data could not be established rather than turning a permissions or coverage failure into a claim that nothing happened.