Media monitoring

Media monitoring is the activity of monitoring the output of the print, online and broadcast media.^{[citation needed]} It can be conducted for a variety of reasons, including political, commercial, scientific, and so on.

In Business

In the commercial sphere, this activity is usually carried out in house or by a media monitoring service, a private company that provides such services to other companies, organisations and individuals on a subscription basis.

The services that media monitoring companies provide typically include the systematic recording of radio and television broadcasts, the collection of press clippings from print media publications, the collection of data from online information sources. The material collected usually consists of any media output that makes reference to the client, its activities and/or its designated topics of interests. The monitoring of online consumer sources such as blogs, forums and social networks is more specifically known as buzz monitoring which informs the company of how its service or product is perceived by users.

In Social Sciences

In academia media monitoring is deployed by social scientists in an attempt to discover e.g. biases in the way the same event is presented in different media, among the media of different countries etc. The use of large scale monitoring techniques by computer scientists enabled the exploration of different aspects of the media system such as the visualisation of the media-sphere^[1], the sentimental and objectivity analysis of news content^[2] etc.

Technologies involved

Media monitoring is practically achieved by a combination of technologies—including audio and video recording, high speed text scanners and text recognition software—and human readers and analysts. The automation of the process is highly desirable and can be partially achieved by deploying data mining and machine learning techniques.

References

1. ^ I. Flaounas, M. Turchi, T. De Bie, and N. Cristianini, "Inference and Validation of Networks", ECML/PKDD, Bled, Slovenia, Springer, pp. 344-358, 2009.
2. ^ N. Godbole,M. Srinivasaiah, S. Skiena, "Large-Scale Sentiment Analysis for News and Blogs", Int. Conf. on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2007), Denver CO, March 26–28, 2007

See also

• Media monitoring service