The future of press clipping services
Published July 5th, 2006 in GeneralMorgan McLintic has an interesting post on the future of press clipping services. For those unfamiliar with such services, McLintic explains:
Press clippings services monitor the news for mentions of key words, normally a company name and perhaps its competitors.
Basically the more keywords you search for, the higher the results and the more you pay.
Morgan goes onto question the future of press clipping companies and points out how they are evolving due to the recent advances in technology:
The advent of online publications, then blogs and Internet search technologies, are changing the game for press clippings services. Many start ups would rather save the $300+ per month, relying on cheaper online services from Google News Alerts to Magenta News. In response clip services, are moving more towards evaluation and analysis, while at the same time moving staff overseas to reduce costs.
I find press clippings to be an interesting topic. When I first joined Drury Communications I was a big advocate for RSS. One of my clients is in the auto industry, so every Wednesday morning when the Irish Times Motoring supplement is published I can read all the articles in it along with all the latest headlines in my RSS reader. As a result I digest a lot of information efficiently because I can read a lot more information in a shorter period of time.
However, online news services are lacking a major feature - impact. For example, there is a huge difference between reading the backpage review in the Irish Times motoring section in print and online. As a work colleague replied to me after I extolled the virtues of RSS, you don’t get the same sense of the article when you read it online. The position of the article on the page, how many column inches it takes up, whether pictures are used and what page it’s on speaks wonders. It’s like the difference between smelling a rose and looking at a picture of one.
The beauty of press clippings is that they are the best of both worlds. MediaMarkets’ online press clipping service means that I can view scanned articles that are relevant for a particular client from a variety of publications, whilst retaining a slight sense of its impact.
At the end of the day, flicking through publications looking for your clients’ coverage might mean getting your hands dirty, but it’s well worth it because it gives a better sense of the fruits of your labour, whilst also keeping you in touch with developments in a variety of sectors.
Interestingly MediaMarkets have begun to offer an online service. None of my clients use it, but at least the company has spotted how the market is developing. They are also involved in evaluation and analysis, but it’s actually this aspect of press clipping services that I call into question.
Press clipping services are effectively an automated process. Computers have trouble distinguishing between a reprinted press release and a review. In terms of impact, they cannot highlight the fact that a publication might be drawing its copy from abroad, so it cannot truly evaluate the effort of media relations. And so on and so forth.
What needs to evolve is how PR consultancies, their clients and press clipping services engage with each other in order to devise an evaluation and analysis system which is able to give a proper indication of how each party is performing. How can you tell if you’ve scored if you don’t know where the goalposts are?
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8 Responses to “The future of press clipping services”
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Google News Alerts
Lets say I was interested in being made aware of new mentions about “Piaras Kelly” that appear online what I would do would be to set us a Google News Alert for the keyword.
If I wanted more then the online experience I could always go buy the hardcopy.
I know this may not have as extensive coverage and may even be delayed but for most this may be sufficient and it may be timelier.
are the irish papers on lexus/nexus? if so, why subscribe to a physical clippings service when a sub to l/n would give you greater scope if your searching?
wrt impact - there is a point missing. while yes, looking at a newspaper, you get notion as to the relative import of a story becuase of the amount of space given over to it, newspapers and magazines have a limited shelf life. once it’s online, it’s got a long tail, and even the most minor mention might come back to haunt you.
Media Markets is an online clippings services.
All the same, physically taking a copy of the article is worth it because handing the client the article or putting it onto a coverage board is much more impactful in a repitch or new business situation rather than going through online clippings.
so it’s one of those never mind the quality, feel the width kinda things?
Well the width can often be a sign of the quality
piaras - sorry to lower the tone, but only a man would say something like that
being serious though - the point i made earlier, about the long tail, is vitally important here. a big half-page feature in the irish times might look wonderful and the client will love it when you show them a physical copy of it, but how many people actually see it, read it?
as an example, abc circ for the irish times is what, 100k? a little bit more? maybe one copy of the paper is read by more than one person, but nobody reads the whole thing cover to cover - realistically, the piece has been read by less than 100k people.
compare that with, say, something that’s freely available on the web (the irish times is ppv, so is no freely available) … *potentially* more people will come across it, allbeit over a longer timeframe.
i know it’s not as startightforward as i’m suggesting - some products (say films and music) would have a higher puter literate audience than other products (i’m stumped for a half-decent example, but am sure you can name loads) and so online references would be of more worth that references in the dead trees format and vice versa. to each product, its most suitable format, wired or dead wood. it’s not an either or game.
but … as the audience as a whole becomes more and more puter literate, the role of the dead trees format decreases. and the measurement of impact in electronic media becomes more important than the measure of impact in traditional media. qed, clipping services will have to adapt to survive and find some way to measure the import of online content. how they do that - what balance they strike between human intervention and computer rules, well that’s the hard question.
You and I both know that, but the phrase ‘long tail’ doesn’t register even along most IT companies in Ireland.
That being said though, just look at how what ends up on the front pages on a newspaper echoes in eternity in that it ends up being discussed on the airwaves, the Internet and the pub. I wouldn’t be so wuick to rule out traditional media. One of my posts next week even highlights that to a point in that research has shown that one in five people in Ireland who are aware of Bebo heard of it through traditional press.
oh don’t get me wrong piaras, i know the net is mostly hot air, a real triumph of hype over experience. but it’s a question of where it’s going here, not where it’s at. and in that context, i think some meeting between traditional and new technology is what the clippings services will have to deliver, if they are to be of value to companies. technology actually exists to make such a prospect potentially more useful than current services - take your reference the inability to differentiate between a real story and a regurgitated press release. consider at the advances in plagirism software and see how that could be incorprated into a more intelligent technology-based clippings service that could recognise patterns in stories, and score then for originality.
the net in this country is not yet an agenda setter, not in the way that the indo, the irish times, joe duffy, prime time or morning ireland are. hardly even in a small way. even in those rare instances where the net has lead a story in this country, it’s its first occurence in a print/broadcast format that is referenced as its origin (eg indymedia’s coverage of rendition through shannon, which only began to become a story when village magazine cut-and-pasted it).
in ireland, the net is still (largely) read by geeks, freaks and folk looking for cheap flights to some airport about 50km away from where they want to go for a cheap weekend. by and large, the internet in this country (and - to be fair - other countries too) follows rather than sets the agenda. it *is* getting better, least i sound totally negative. a small handful of quality sites are raising the bar for others with aspirations of quality. but it is only a small number, and they’re not yet making an impact on setting the news agenda.
as for bebo, that one-in-five have heard of it through traditional media first rather than online - you’ve got to admire their marketing department, don’t you? straight out of the ryan air school of even bad news is good news.