Media monitoring service
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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
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[edit] History
In the past, the mass media consisted almost solely of printed matter, so monitoring the press was the chief activity of such agencies. 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 and he realised that he could use this vanity to turn a profit. The agency later became Romeike & Curtis and is now part of Cision.[1][2]
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.[3]
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 commericial 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.
[edit] 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.
Organizations from the US Government to most of the Fortune 500 companies, and everything in between, use news monitoring' companies to track their presence or the competitors presence in the media. News monitoring clients may also use a news monitoring service to track industry specific trends or legislation. City, State, and Federal agencies use news monitoring services to stay informed in regions they otherwise would not be able to monitor themselves. 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 the larger news monitoring services.
The concept of watching media outlet websites using automated technology was pioneered by WebClipping.com in 1998. Since then, there has been a growing market of companies focused on tracking and monitoring online news, blog and social media content. As more news content is available online, this has become an increasingly popular solution.
Industry trade associations include the North American Conference of Press Clipping Services and the International Association of Broadcast Monitors.
[edit] Illustrative examples
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.
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 legislation.
[edit] Working methods
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.
[edit] Trade Groups
The International Association of Broadcast Monitors (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.
[edit] Professional Organization
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.
[edit] Future trends
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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.[citation needed]
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.
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.[citation needed] 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.[citation needed]
The concept of watching media outlet websites using automated technology was pioneered by WebClipping.com in 1998. Since then, there has been a growing market of companies focused on tracking and monitoring online news, blog and social media content. As more news content is available online, this has become an increasingly popular solution.[citation needed]
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Press Clippings: Tools or Trophies, Romeike & Curtice Ltd, c.1973.
- ^ Cision website
- ^ Media Monitors Interactive history
