Despite all the doomsayers out there writing obituaries for the nation’s newspaper industry, 150 million Americans – two out of three adults – read a local newspaper last week. Newspaper Association of America research from 2011 by Scarborough USA indicates almost 70 percent of your neighbors read either a printed newspaper or its online counterpart within the past seven days. How could that be? Well, it’s because newspapers still represent the most trusted source of news in America. I know that’s hard to believe when you hear the mainstream media criticized at every turn on cable TV. But it’s true. When citizens want to get the facts, they turn to their local newspaper. This is National Newspaper Week, and this year’s theme, “Newspapers – Your Number One Source for Local News,” underscores the importance of the nation’s newspapers in the daily lives of citizens. Newspapers certainly have their competitors out there: a hundred million websites, hundreds of thousands of bloggers, Facebook, Twitter, billboards, radio and television. And that competition is formidable. But where does the vast majority of the “authoritative” news coverage originate that other media outlets utilize? Simple … the nation’s daily and weekly newspapers. If print is dead, then why do more than 7,000 weekly and 1,400 daily newspapers still open their doors every day and report what is hap-, pening in their communities? Because they take seriously the importance of local news. They know those who plunk down their hard- earned cash want their newspaper to cover those events that are unique to each community. Every day, newspapers in our local communities cover the big stories and the routine as well. Editors take to heart the newspaper’s role as the most comprehensive source of a community’s historical record, so births, deaths, weddings, engagements, business accomplishments, crime, courts, real estate transactions and a myriad of other day-to-day news events are covered along with the important governmental decisions that affect our lives. Newspapers are the number one source of local news in every city and county in America because we show up each and every day and cover those stories. It’s what our readers have come to expect. And it’s what we do better than any other news source in America. Doug Anstaett is executive director of the Kansas Press Association and current president of the Newspaper Association Managers

Media monitoring service

A media monitoring service provides clients with documentation, analysis, or copies of media content of interest to the clients. Services tend to specialize by media type or content type. For example, some services monitor news and public affairs content while others monitor advertising, sports sponsorships, product placement, video or audio news releases, use of copyrighted video or audio, infomercials, “watermarked” video/audio, and even billboards.
Such services hold, or have held, various names – changing over time as new forms of media are created. Alternative names for such services include:

Press/media cutting agency/service
Press/media clipping agency/service

In the past, the mass media consisted almost solely of printed matter, so monitoring the press was the chief activity of such agencies. But with radio, television and the Internet now providing output of interest to their clients the services have expanded their activities.

Typically, a client (either an individual or an organization – such as a charity or corporation) approaches a media monitoring service to keep track of what is being said about them, their competitors, or other topics of interest.

An author has a book published and has a strong interest in tracking how well the book is received by critics. The media monitoring 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 bits 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, in which they are featured.

In the past the services relied on employing people to read through printed matter and physically cut out relevant articles. With the vast amount of publications on offer now some services use scanning equipment with optical character recognition to automate this task to some degree.

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 still employ human monitors who review and abstract program content.

Online media monitoring services utilize automated software called spiders or robots (bots) to automatically monitor the content of online news sources including newspapers, magazines, trade journals, TV station and news syndication services.

The International Association of Broadcast Monitoring (IABM) is a world-wide 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. Members of IABM subscribe to a code of ethics for broadcast news monitors.

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

Some people can argue that Google News provides a media monitoring service by allowing queries on 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.

Starting in 2005 companies like Global News Intelligence began using Java based artifical 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.

As a PR professional you must show your client that you are doing a good job. One way to justify your existence is to measure the results generated by your press releases, TV placements, and Internet articles. What is the best way to monitor and measure these hits. Yes you could do this yourself and all of the papers that you have sent a press release, use “Google Alerts”, and watch check the TV news each night to see what aired, or was published. A better and more effective and efficient way do do this is to hire a media monitoring company to do this for you. Lets break each portion of the media down and examine exactly what can be measured.

Print Media:
In print specifically referring to daily and weekly newspapers, and monthly magazines, you can measure the article count, the circulation, the frequency, and the media value. To measure the count is easy enough, clipping services read All of the papers in a specific coverage area, and search for articles that mention your topics, then send them to you either hard copy or convert them digitally. Then, you must have all of the information about each publisher ready and available when you have an article printed. Next you must know whether that paper is a daily, weekly, bi-monthly, or monthly paper or magazine and tally that. Then count the circulation of each of those articles. Press Clipping Services gather this information regularly through media buyers, and get the national rate from each publication that they read. The circulation can often be found online, but may not always be up to date. Most modern clipping services use sophisticated bar coding and tracking systems for counting and measuring clippings count, circulation, and frequency. The hardest portion of this measurement is the Media Value. To calculate the media value for an individual article you mus know the rate and the length in column inches of the article. if you multiply that you get the Media Value. Clipping Services usually have a running tally of clippings and add them to a spread sheet, then at the end of the time period, a count if performed and a report is generated.

Television News:
Television News is similar to Print media in the fact that you can calculate media value, and obtain audience ratings through companies like Nielsen’s. Media Monitoring services record the closed captions of each newscast and run queries in a database against those entries. Generated is a report that includes Audience ratings. Next is the 30 second ad value, which is used to calculate the real media value and thereby create the Publicity value too. The calculated media value takes into account the length of the video news clip and multiplies it times the 30 second ad rate generating a value which equals the advertising equivalency value. To get the Publicity value that A.E.V. is multiplied times the PRSA multiplier of x3, x5, or x7 depending upon the placement within the newscast. Some more advanced systems allow you to even assign a Tone (positive, negative or neutral) and Prominence (mention, feature, or focus)to each story. The raw data from these reports can be used in a variety of ways to display your effectiveness in diverting or spinning a story in the right direction.

Internet News:
There are a few aspects of internet news that will determine whether or not you wish to count them. Blogs for instance, is that counted as real journalism or not? You must consider the source, but you must keep in mind that a blog journalistic or not must still be counted and does have some influence, therefore you need to measure that. Google Alerts can do this, but it only crawls sites once a day at best. Media monitoring service have bots that crawl specific media outlets websites such as newspapers, magazines, tv stations, radio stations, aggregators, and online only, and blogs. The major goal of this is to count these stories. Using a media monitoring service to do this is the most effective way to do so since they have the search expertise and resources to pool all of the data into one aggregated searchable reportable source. Adding additional values to Internet stories is difficult. You can do a word count and count the “in-links” or pages that link back to that page or article. Anything other than that would require additional information from websites like Alexa.com or Google analytics.

Now that you have measured all of this data taking it and reporting it back to you boss, the board of directors, or the public affairs committee, is the next step. You will need to generate reports that back up the facts, and report to show that you have sent press releases to X number of sources and Y number of sources picked up the story, showing the total number of stories, audience/circulation, media value, and column inches/runtime/wordcount. A good media campaign should have a goal, and these measured results help to prove that goal was met.