| By :
William Comcowich
You've reached the conclusion you need a media monitoring program for your organization. What is the best approach to assess news monitoring approaches and select from among the many commercial media monitoring services? With the effects of the Great recession still being felt, there may be a temptation to hone in on the media monitoring approach that appears least expensive. Usually, that is having staff do the monitoring using free online tools. As with many B2B (business-to-business) services, however, what appears inexpensive on the surface is often not the most effective, best value or the best use of internal public relations and marketing resources. "Print" News Monitoring vs. Online News Monitoring For most organizations, news monitoring and clipping is the core media monitoring service. Today, news in traditional media (newspapers, consumer magazines, trade journals, news syndication services) is best monitored on the Internet. The truth of the matter is that, with rare exceptions, most every article that appears in newspapers, magazines and trade journals also appears in the publication's online edition. In addition to monitoring and clipping most every print publication, online news monitoring services capture clips from thousands of online news sources that don't exist in print. Widely-viewed online news portals include, among many others, MarketWatch and Yahoo! News and Yahoo! Finance, CNN and CNBC. In addition, Internet news monitoring offers worldwide coverage in most every language. The online news monitoring software misses fewer clips than human readers or digital scanners of print publications, especially broadsheet newspapers. On balance, then, you get far more coverage and clips by monitoring online sources than through traditional press clipping services.
Online news monitoring is also more timely than press clipping services since most publications publish stories on their Website as the print versions are being delivered to newsstands and post offices. (Check most any of the major daily newspapers in the afternoon and you'll see many of the next day's stories in the print edition.) Press clipping services typically charge a monthly "reading" fee and an additional fee for each clip delivered. The per clip fees can mount up rather rapidly. The monthly bills can cause billing hassles and budgeting issues because of widely varying monthly charges. In contrast, online media monitoring services usually charge only a predictable fixed monthly fee with no per clip fee. In most every case, then, online news monitoring services are less expensive and offer greater value than traditional press clipping services. Online news monitoring offers a wide choice of services. Free Online News Monitoring Services First, there are free online news monitoring services - usually supported by advertising. The leader is Google News. It offers reasonably good coverage of news sources, but not as extensive as the paid subscription services. The Google News service will send you daily news alerts via e-mail with articles containing the keywords you specify. But there are drawbacks to free online news monitoring services that require users to invest substantial time in finding clips. With Google News, neither the e-mail alerts nor the organic searches deliver all the clips. Google uses its algorithms to deliver only what it considers the most relevant or important articles (clips). For "market intelligence" purposes this may be adequate. For public relations monitoring and measurement, it is seriously lacking. To get all the international clips in Google News or to monitor more than 10 key words or phrases, you have to conduct multiple daily searches -' a time-consuming and tedious process for staff. And if you enter multiple searches each day, you will undoubtedly get redundant clips in your search results. Staff will have to filter out duplicate clips manually. The Boolean search capabilities in Google News are not as advanced as most of the paid subscription services. The result is that free news monitoring search engines often deliver irrelevant or extraneous articles, especially if you are searching for corporate or brand names that are the same as those in another type of business. Google News also limits searches to a maximum of 10 key words. In Google News and other free news monitoring services, there is no automated way to store the search results. To store the clips, a staff person will have to cut and paste the clips into a database or spreadsheet - a tedious and time-consuming task - or print out each article, an expensive proposition (especially in color). Google News also does not provide measurement/circulation data so measurement of PR success (except numbers of clips, the least important PR metric) is near impossible. Nonetheless, for many small and mid-size organizations, news search engines such as Google News or Yahoo News provide sufficient coverage and features. A free search engine may well meet your needs if you have just a few search terms, typically receive only a few clips each day, have no need for measurement data or tools, and are willing to invest the time to conduct multiple searches each day. The free search services, however, are not truly free. They can be expensive in terms of the amount of time required to manually perform the key word searches each day. Since the free news monitoring services don't store search results, as do most commercial media monitoring services, you have to deal with the time sink and hassle of transferring clips to a database or spreadsheet. There is also the cost of then printing out the clips. Searching and managing those paper-based clips is more difficult and time-consuming than the digital clips subscription services store in a fully searchable online database. Using RSS feeds will help minimize staff time devoted to media monitoring. Paid Subscription Online News Monitoring Services The subscription online news monitoring services including the leaders CyberAlert, CustomScoop, and Meltwater offer many features not offered by free services including: a) more comprehensive news coverage including virtually all the daily and weekly newspapers, consumer magazines, trade journals, news syndication services, news portals on the Web, websites of broadcast news organizations worldwide - all in multiple languages b) automated daily search queries in multiple languages for multiple countries with virtually unlimited search terms c) advanced Boolean logic to minimize extraneous or irrelevant clips d) online digital clip archive to store, search and manage clips e) instant software-based translation of foreign language clips f) PR measurement data attached to each news media clip g) dynamically created media measurement charts and graphs g) custom features to meet special needs. The customized news monitoring features can assure that you get exactly the news coverage you want with a minimum investment of staff time. Do you want clips only from a custom list of specific publications — not all news sources? Do you want only "important" articles, not all mentions of your key search terms? Do you want only one copy of the same story — a press release for instance? Do you have special delivery requirements such as clip delivery throughout the business day or XML format? Do you prefer RSS delivery? Do you want the clips delivered at a specific or unusual time each day? Do you want the clips delivered to multiple people? Do you want media clips filtered and sorted differently for different clients, brands, or groups of employees? Do you automatically assemble selected news clips into a daily or weekly news briefing for the organization's executives or sales force? Do you prefer to have human readers edit clips before delivery? Most of the specialists in online news monitoring offer these customized services. The traditional press clipping services such as Burrelle'sLuce or Cision also offer online news monitoring services. But don't let the press clipping services sell you both press clipping and online news monitoring. Most every article that are published in print publications also appear in the Web version of that publication. Some small community newspapers (mostly weeklies) and some trade journals (mostly medical and academic) do not publish all their print content on the Internet — but that's rare. In fact, abstracts of all medical journals are also available online at PubMed, a free service of the National Library of Medicine. Ask the press clipping service to monitor only those publications in print that are not on the web or do not publish all their content on the web - and everything else online - in order to avoid duplicate clips and escalating variable costs. Once you've decided on the custom feature you want and have made a contact list of commercial media monitoring services that seem to meet your needs - you can begin the process of selecting a media monitoring vendor.
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