Featured vs Latest: how the feed prioritizes what matters now

What Featured and Latest are

Industry News is HQ's single feed of restoration industry content: articles, videos, podcasts, event listings, vendor announcements, product launches, and Verinode's own research. It is a reading surface, not something you manage. When you land on it with the All chip active (the default), the feed splits into two labeled groups instead of one long list:

• Featured, its heading set in copper, holding whatever is currently time-sensitive.
• Latest, its heading in gray, holding everything else, newest first.

The point of the split is triage. Featured is the small set of items worth checking before you scroll past them; Latest is the ordinary, chronological stream of everything published recently. This article covers how an item earns a spot in Featured, how long it stays there, and why you only ever see the two groups laid out this way in one specific view.

For the mechanics of the five filter chips themselves (All, Featured, Vendor, Industry, Verinode) and how their counts are computed, see /help/hq-news-filter-lenses. This article assumes you already know the chip row exists and focuses on the Featured/Latest layout underneath it.

Where to find it

Open News from the HQ sidebar, or go directly to hq.verinode.ai/news. The page header reads Industry News, with a one-line summary underneath (how many items are in the feed, how many are featured, how many are vendor items), then the filter chip row, then the feed itself.

How an item earns a place in Featured

Featured is not a manual pin or a permanent editorial badge. An item lands in Featured because Verinode's content pipeline has marked it time-sensitive, meaning it needs to surface ahead of the normal chronological order because it matters right now rather than merely being recent. A time-sensitive item can carry an expiration date; while that date is still in the future, or if no expiration date was set at all, the item stays in Featured. The moment that date passes, the item is no longer Featured.

This is a rolling, live calculation, not a static list someone curates once. Every time the feed loads, Featured is recomputed from which items are currently time-sensitive and not yet expired. An item can be Featured today and quietly fall out of Featured tomorrow with nothing you need to do about it.

When a Featured item stops being Featured

There are two different ways an item can drop out of Featured, and it is worth knowing which one applies:

1. Its own expiration date passes. If the item was given a specific expiration date, once that date is behind it, the item does not just lose its Featured status, it drops out of the entire News feed. It does not slide down into Latest first. Featured and gone happen at the same moment.
2. It ages past the feed's general freshness window. Outside articles, vendor news, and other third-party content are only held in the feed for a couple of weeks from their publish date, regardless of any expiration date. Once an outside item crosses that window, it leaves the feed entirely, the same way an expired item does. Verinode's own research and analysis is exempt from this window; it stays in the feed until it is explicitly retired or reaches its own expiration date, since that kind of content does not go stale the way a two-week-old vendor press release does.

Either way, the pattern is the same: once an item is out, it is out of the whole feed, not demoted to a lower group. There is no "used to be Featured" holding area.

Featured pins to the top only when you are looking at everything

The Featured/Latest split only appears when the All chip is active. Click Featured, Vendor, Industry, or Verinode instead, and the split disappears entirely, replaced by one plain grid of whatever matches that filter, with no Featured or Latest heading anywhere on the page.

The reasoning is straightforward: Featured and Latest exist to answer one question, "of everything in the feed, what needs my attention first?" Once you have already narrowed the feed to a specific lens, you have effectively already answered that question for yourself; you told News you only want vendor items, or only want Verinode's own research, so there is no remaining ambiguity for a priority split to resolve. A card in the Vendor lens can absolutely be time-sensitive underneath, and it still carries the copper outline that marks a Featured card wherever it appears, but the page will not draw you a separate Featured heading inside an already-filtered view.

If the feed has zero time-sensitive items in it right now, the All view shows no Featured heading and no Latest heading either, just the plain grid, since there is nothing to split apart.

Sort order inside each group

Within Featured, items are ordered newest published first, same as Latest. Featured is not itself sorted by urgency or by how soon an expiration date lands; it is sorted the same way as the rest of the feed, just pulled to the top as a group. So if two items are both time-sensitive right now, the one published more recently sits above the other one inside Featured.

Seeing Featured status when you open an item

Clicking any card, Featured or not, opens it in a preview panel over the page so you can read the full item without leaving News. If the item is currently time-sensitive, the panel shows an amber Featured badge alongside its kind (Article, Video, Podcast, and so on), its source, its publish date, and, for video or podcast items, its duration. A separate copper Verinode research badge appears there too when the item was authored directly by Verinode, independent of whether it is Featured. The original source link, when the item has one, sits at the bottom of the panel as "View at [source name]."

Using Featured and Latest day to day

1. 1Land on Industry News with All active. Scan the copper Featured heading first, that is the short list worth reading before anything else in the feed.
2. 2If Featured is empty, the whole page collapses to a plain grid starting with Latest, there is nothing time-sensitive in the feed right now.
3. 3Work down through Latest at your own pace; it is the ordinary, newest-first stream of everything else.
4. 4If you want to check something specific, click Vendor, Industry, or Verinode instead. You will lose the Featured/Latest split, but any time-sensitive item in that narrower view still carries its copper card outline so you can still spot it.

Empty states

No items in the feed at all. Before any content has flowed in, the page shows the title and a short description of what the feed will eventually hold (Verinode research, industry articles, podcasts, vendor moves, and equipment launches), and in place of the feed: "No items in the feed yet. New articles will appear here as the upstream content scraper publishes them." There is no chip row, and no Featured/Latest split, in this state.

A filtered lens with nothing to show. If you land on a narrowed view with nothing matching, the feed area reads: "No items match this filter yet." This message never appears under All, since a genuinely empty feed is handled by the state above instead.

The HQ privacy boundary

Everything in Industry News, Featured or Latest, is network-wide industry content: Verinode research, outside publishers, vendor and product news. None of it is a franchisee's own business data, and nothing here surfaces a specific membership's numbers, activity, or identity. Being time-sensitive is a property of the content itself (a vendor recall, an event deadline, a timely industry development), never a property of any one franchisee's account. This is shared, public-facing content, not the private layer where a franchisee's own data lives.

Related help articles

• /help/hq-news-filter-lenses: the five filter chips (All, Featured, Vendor, Industry, Verinode), their counts, and how zero-count chips hide themselves
• /help/hq-overview: what HQ is and how its sections fit together
• /help/hq-benchmarks: the peer-benchmark surfaces, which hold Verinode's own network intelligence rather than outside industry content