Media monitoring service
Encyclopedia
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:
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
.
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.
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.
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.
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.
s 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 magazine
s, radio programs, television programs and so on. The author will receive a printed bundle of clippings, i.e., the pages of the magazines and newspaper
s 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 blog
s.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 http://www.bluebytes.info 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. 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.
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. The TV search appliance called the SnapStream Server
is deployed in the City of Austin and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
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, http://www.cision.com and VMS http://www.vmsinfo.com 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, http://www.bluebytes.info 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.
Telegraphy
Telegraphy is the long-distance transmission of messages via some form of signalling technology. Telegraphy requires messages to be converted to a code which is known to both sender and receiver...
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 mediaMass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
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
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
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
Cision
Cision AB is a business and communication intelligence firm that provides media research, distribution, monitoring and communication evaluation, as well as target group identification and distribution of information for PR and IR purposes to public relations agencies, corporations, government...
.
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.
As radio
Radio
Radio is the transmission of signals through free space by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space...
and later television
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
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
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
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
Closed captioning
Closed captioning is the process of displaying text on a television, video screen or other visual display to provide additional or interpretive information to individuals who wish to access it...
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 RelationsPublic relations
Public relations is the actions of a corporation, store, government, individual, etc., in promoting goodwill between itself and the public, the community, employees, customers, etc....
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 criticCritic
A critic is anyone who expresses a value judgement. Informally, criticism is a common aspect of all human expression and need not necessarily imply skilled or accurate expressions of judgement. Critical judgements, good or bad, may be positive , negative , or balanced...
s 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 magazine
Magazine
Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three...
s, radio programs, television programs and so on. The author will receive a printed bundle of clippings, i.e., the pages of the magazines and newspaper
Newspaper
A newspaper is a scheduled publication containing news of current events, informative articles, diverse features and advertising. It usually is printed on relatively inexpensive, low-grade paper such as newsprint. By 2007, there were 6580 daily newspapers in the world selling 395 million copies a...
s 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 blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
s.
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 ParisParis
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
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
Google News
Google News is a free news aggregator provided by Google Inc, selecting recent items from thousands of publications by an automatic aggregation algorithm....
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.
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
Meltwater Group
Meltwater Group is a Software as a Service company founded in Oslo, Norway in 2001 based on research originally funded by the Norwegian Computing Center. The founder and CEO, Jørn Lyseggen, has also founded a number of other startups...
, offering several online information services under a SaaS
Saas
SAAS is an abbreviation for* Social Accountability Accreditation Services* Software as a service * Student Awards Agency for Scotland* Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences* South Australian Ambulance Service...
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 http://www.bluebytes.info 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. 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.
At provider of television search technology, Houston-based SnapStream Media
SnapStream Media
SnapStream Media is a privately held software company based in Houston, Texas, USA that focuses on building fluent user experiences in digital entertainment software...
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
Personal computer
A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...
, without relying on an outside media monitoring service. The TV search appliance called the SnapStream Server
SnapStream Server
The SnapStream Server is a cross between a DVR and a search engine that enables organizations to monitor television based on the closed captioning mandated by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission attached to every program...
is deployed in the City of Austin and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Analysis & Reporting
With technologyTechnology
Technology is the making, usage, and knowledge of tools, machines, techniques, crafts, systems or methods of organization in order to solve a problem or perform a specific function. It can also refer to the collection of such tools, machinery, and procedures. The word technology comes ;...
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, http://www.cision.com and VMS http://www.vmsinfo.com 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, http://www.bluebytes.info 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.