Media monitoring is the activity of monitoring the output of the print, online and broadcast media. 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

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...

, 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

Internet forum

An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived...

 and social networks is more specifically known as buzz monitoring

Buzz monitoring

Buzz monitoring is the keeping track of consumer responses to commercial services and products, to establish the marketing buzz surrounding a new or existing offer...

 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, the sentimental and objectivity analysis of news content 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

Data mining

Data mining , a relatively young and interdisciplinary field of computer science is the process of discovering new patterns from large data sets involving methods at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics and database systems...

 and machine learning

Machine learning

Machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, is a scientific discipline concerned with the design and development of algorithms that allow computers to evolve behaviors based on empirical data, such as from sensor data or databases...

techniques.