Abstract: This disclosure describes a system that facilitates analyzing a broad and continuously updated sample of recent written communications for the purpose of identifying emerging and important news and topic developments before they attract broad attention. The system continuously discovers topics and relationships between topics in the written communications as the communications are received. Individual topics and topic relationships are continuously analyzed for the purpose of detecting changes in the frequency and manner in which the topics are addressed and changes in the content that accompanies the topics. The system uses this analysis as the basis for identifying certain topics and the communications that address them as emerging, and therefore, important. The system uses a display feature to highlight these topics and communications for a user to review or investigate further.