Media monitoring service

A media monitoring service, a press clipping service or a clipping service as known in earlier times, provides clients with copies of media content, which is of specific interest to them and subject to changing demand; what they provide may include documentation, content, analysis, or editorial opinion, specifically or widely. These services tend to specialize their coverage by subject, industry, size, geography, publication, journalist, or editor. The printed sources which could be readily monitored greatly expanded with the advent of telegraphy and submarine cables in the mid- to late-19th century; the various types of media now available proliferated in the 20th century, with the development of radio, television, the copier and the internet. Though media monitoring is generally used for capturing content or editorial opinion, it also may be used to capture advertising content.

Media monitoring services have been variously termed over time, as new players entered the market, new forms of media were created, and as new uses from available content developed. An existing group may provide such a monitoring service, as it relates to their main purpose, while a monitoring agency generally provides such as their main business. Alternative terms for these monitoring services as well as the information they provide include:

• Press clipping service or agency
• Media cutting service or agency
• Information Logistics Service
• Media intelligence

History

Since mass media traditionally has been limited solely of print media, naturally the monitoring was also limited to this media. The world's first press clipping agency was established in London in 1852 by a Polish newsagent named Romeike. Actors, writers, musicians and artists would visit his shop to look for articles about themselves in his Continental stock. It was then that Romeike realised that he could turn this into a profitable business. The agency later became Romeike & Curtis and is now part of Cision.^[1][2]

An agency was established in Paris in 1879 by Alfred Cherie, who offered a press-clipping service to Parisian actors, enabling them to buy reviews of their work rather than purchasing the whole newspaper.^[3]

As radio and later television broadcasting were introduced in the 20th century, press clipping agencies began to expand their services into the monitoring of these broadcast media, and this task was greatly facilitated by the development of commercial audio and video tape recording systems in the 1950s and 1960s. With the growth of the Internet in the 1990s, media monitoring service extended their services to the monitoring of online information sources using new digital search and scan technologies to provide output of interest to their clients.

Typically, individual or organisational clients—e.g. private companies and corporations, charities, government departments and ministries, -- will subscribe to a media monitoring service to keep track of what is being said about them, their field of operations, their competitors, or other specified topics of interest.

Industry

The news monitoring industry provides government agencies, corporations, public relations professionals, and other organizations access to news information created by the media. Generally monitoring print, broadcast, and internet content for any mention of specific subjects of interest, a news monitoring company will analyze and provide feedback to their client in the form of press clippings, monitoring reports, and media analysis.

Evolution

From a cut & clip service, media clipping today has expanded to incorporate technology with information. Media monitoring clients can now opt to include print, broadcast and online to capture all their media exposure. While this technology has allowed some of the process to be automated, many media monitoring agencies still offer the services of trained professionals to review and validate results.

Service delivery happens at 3 fronts. Clients may get their original hard copy clips through traditional means (mail/overnight delivery) or may opt for digital delivery. Digital delivery allows the end user to receive via email all the relevant news of the company, competition and industry daily, with updates as they break. The same news may also be indexed (as allowed by copyright laws) in a searchable database to be accessed by subscribers. Another option of this service is auto-analysis, wherein the data can be viewed & compared in different formats.

Every organization that uses PR invariably uses news monitoring as well. In addition to tracking their own publicity, self-generated or otherwise, news monitoring clients also use the service to track competition or industry specific trends or legislation, to build a contact base of reporters, experts, leaders for future reference, to audit the effectiveness of their PR campaigns, to verify that PR, marketing and sales messages are in sync, and to measure impact on their target market. City, State, and Federal agencies use news monitoring services to stay informed in regions they otherwise would not be able to monitor themselves and to verify that the public information disseminated is accurate, accessible in multiple formats and available to the public. Some monitoring services specialize in one or more areas of press clipping, TV and radio monitoring, or internet tracking. Media analysis is also offered by most news monitoring services.

Television news monitoring companies, especially in the United States, capture and index closed captioning text and search it for client references. Some TV monitoring companies employ human monitors who review and abstract program content; other services rely on automated search programs to search and index stories.

Online media monitoring services utilize automated software called spiders or robots (bots) to automatically monitor the content of free online news sources including newspapers, magazines, trade journals, TV station and news syndication services. Online services generally provide links but may also provide text versions of the articles. Results may or may not be verified for accuracy by the online monitoring service. Most newspapers do not include all of their print content online and some have web content that does not appear in print.

In the United States, there are trade associations formed to share best practices which include the North American Conference of Press Clipping Services and the International Association of Broadcast Monitors.

Language & media - the big challenges

In English speaking countries, the service of media monitoring, collation & dissemination is fairly simple and most organizations which use Public Relations also use media monitoring. However, in multi-language & multi-dialect countries the challenge of collating data locally and disseminating in a translated language of business (usually English) is a daunting task. The situation in other multi-language countries is no different.

The second large challenge for Information Logistics is the growing number of media and the media types. For example, in a country like India there are over 50,000 registered print publications, 250+ TV channels, a growing number of relevant internet sites and several hundred new blogs that need to be captured every day. Several of these need to be translated for a 'heads-up' and analysis needs to be constant and real-time.

Illustrative examples

An author that recently published a book and who has a strong interest in tracking how well the book is received by critics may hire a media monitoring service. The service will have a method by which they extract any information about the author and their book from newly printed magazines, radio programs, television programs and so on. The author will receive a printed bundle of clippings, i.e., the pages of the magazines and newspapers relating to them and their book. They may also receive recordings of any radio reviews, television programs and so on, which refer to his book.

Most major companies and corporations subscribe to media monitoring services to keep track of any reports or comments in the media. A fast food company, for example, would receive summaries of coverage and/or copies of material drawn from a wide range of sources, including TV and radio news reports, commentaries on TV and radio shows, newspaper opinion/commentary columns, magazine articles and internet blogs.

The material collected would include any media items that relate to the company's commercial operations, its corporate reputation or its media image. This would include reports about or discussions of the fast food industry in general, and any media item that specifically mentions the company, its clients and suppliers, its competitors or related interest groups or other specified subjects of interest, such as food/health regulations and

Trade Groups

The North American Conference of Press Clipping Services (NACPCS) is a conference of independently owned companies located throughout North America. Originated in the 1950s by a handful of small press clipping services, the NACPCS has grown to over 25 members with affiliate members located throughout the world. As the industry has moved from just mailing press clippings from newspapers and magazines to its clients, to providing electronic delivery of internet news, so too has the North American Conference of Press Clipping Services. The members of the NACPCS are committed to the comprehensive monitoring and analysis of all media: daily newspapers, non-daily newspapers, magazines, trade journals, television and radio news as well as the on-line press. All publications are read, from major metropolitan daily newspapers to the smallest rural weekly. Unlike internet-only monitoring companies which monitor just the electronic editions of newspapers, our members rely on subscriptions to the actual publications as resources. So instead of providing a mere print-out of the text of an article, NACPCS members furnish news articles as they appeared in the print publications. NACPCS members will increase their monitoring of the internet as that source for news continues to grow. More importantly, however, is the commitment to reading actual print publications. As long as newspapers and magazines appear in print, the members of the North American Conference of Press Clipping Services will continue to monitor them and provide the news articles as they appeared. A list of all legitimate NACPCS member newspaper clipping services may be found here.

The International Association of Broadcast Monitors (IABM) is a worldwide trade association made up of news retrieval services which record, monitor and archive broadcast news sources including television, radio and internet. It acts as a "clearinghouse" or "forum" for discussion on topics of collective concerns and acts as a united voice for the news monitoring industry.

Professional Organization

FIBEP (Federation Internationale des Bureaux d’Extraits de Presse/International Federation of the Press Clipping Services) is a professional media monitoring organization. The FIBEP was established in 1953 in Paris and has 92 members from 43 countries. Every 18 months, the members of FIBEP members organize a three-day FIBEP-Congress. In work groups, workshops, reports and discussion circles, members discuss market trends.

Trends

Google News provides a basic media monitoring service that allows queries that search for the number of times a keyword has been mentioned in thousands of publications, based on the publications' websites. However, specialized services will very often provide a much more reliable service based on trusted publications and human reading.^{[citation needed]}

The Europe Media Monitor has been searching the internet for news articles since 2002. Articles are sorted in predefined categories in more than 40 languages. The current top stories in the news are identified with a clustering approach. MedISys (an extension of the Europe Media Monitor) does media monitoring for public health related web sites and identifies emerging risks, e.g. outbreaks of infectious diseases, by screening specialist medical web sites in addition to general news web sites. Both services are available free of charge.

Since 1982, the Asia Pacific company Media Monitors provides services across Print, Broadcast and with the rise of the internet, online channels. Items are provided to clients by relevance, identified for duplicates and contain a relative audience and currency figure.

Another provider, Meltwater News, focuses on online media intelligence. It was founded in 2001, and has since grown into the Meltwater Group, offering several online information services under a SaaS subscription model.

In 2004, multi-language Information Logistics Services/Media Monitoring services in India/China started to gain prominence. With several services having stemmed as offshoots of PR agencies. In India, services like Worldwide News India and Blue Bytes [1] became leaders by offering an accurate & timely service, supported by auto-analysis. In the next phase, the Information Logistics industry has been to automate the tedious reporting and auto-calculation of the AVE (Advertising Value Equivalence) as well.

Starting in 2005 companies like Global News Intelligence began using Java based artificial intelligence to automate the process of coding clipped content for tone and sentiment.^{[citation needed]} This emerging technology is often referred to as media meta analysis. Key technological differentation to clip/cut only services is instant visualization media tone and sentiment without requiring the user to review content. This method, although promising, is far less accurate than human coding.^{[citation needed]}

At provider of television search technology, Houston-based SnapStream Media pioneered a hybrid DVR-search engine in 2007 which has since enabled PR companies, government organizations and broadcast production facilities to independently find mentions via PC, without relying on an outside media monitoring service.^[4] The TV search appliance called the SnapStream Server is deployed in the City of Austin^[5] and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.^[6]

Analysis & Reporting

With technology advancements, media monitoring also gave rise to very large databases which contained virtually every detail of the press appearance. Technology assists in reading article details, author, spokespersons, message, tonality, geography, competition, city of origin among many other permutations. Real-time, online analysis has now become possible, giving PR agencies and corporate communications professionals a very easy & practical analysis & measurement tool to showcase tangible results for an essentially intangible offering.

A few technology leaders in media intelligence and monitoring like Cision, USA, [2] and VMS [3] have developed several user-defined permutations to the intelligence. Media Monitors APAC provides an Advertising Space Rate (ASR) value calculated using audience and the media providers' rate cards. Blue Bytes, India, [4] has developed an auto-report generation mechanism which creates an auto-generated Advertising Value Equivalence (AVE) to give a monetary value to the PR value generated. Another new development which lends greater credence to the PR value generated, is that the AVE also has the option of taking into account tonality, presence of branding, etc. apart from size of the article alone.

With the advent of sophisticated analysis being available outsourced, most PR agencies outsource their media monitoring, reporting and intelligence, sticking to their core competence of image building and relationship management.

References

1. ^ Press Clippings: Tools or Trophies, Romeike & Curtice Ltd, c.1973.
2. ^ Cision website
3. ^ Media Monitors Interactive history
4. ^ Engadget HD Article Feature
5. ^ Gallaga, Omar (August 12, 2010). "News industry secret: we have Super DVRs". Austin Statesman (Austin 360). http://www.austin360.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/digitalsavant/entries/2010/08/12/news_industry_s.html?cxntfid=blogs_digital_savant. Retrieved August 16, 2010. 
6. ^ Patel, Purva (December 22, 2009). "Local company is early to video search technology". Houston Chronicle. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/tech/news/6783602.html. Retrieved August 16, 2010.