Have you ever come across a breaking media story of interest to your company or organization hours before your public relations firm had?  It may be because your firm may be relying on interns and Google news to monitor your media while billing you thousands of dollars per month for use of a free and inconsistent system.

“It’s all on the web!” That is the strategy too many traditional PR firms use in providing media monitoring services to their clients, which implicitly consigns all print media to the attic of the Twentieth Century? How many clients have told us that Google News is a simple and effective way to monitor the media? As we know, the Internet revolution has, and continues to, disrupt the media monitoring industry, forcing it to continually reinvent itself to meet new standards of relevance and analysis. But to declare print dead, and the Internet the only media that matters, would be a little hasty.

In fact, a study from the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA), which represents  the interests of publishers of the national and regional press in managing the licensing of content and copyright for the international market, has proved exactly the opposite.   The first finding of the NLA study is that, for a given sample, only one in four articles are found both online and in the newspaper (26%), while 33% is available just in print and 41% only on the web. This ratio naturally varies from one publication to the next, but the trend exists: not everything in a newspaper is reproduced on its website, and vice versa.

Digging deeper, we find that 56% of the content in a given newspaper is unique and not to be found on the web while, out of all the content on a paper’s website, 61% is not included in the print edition. Of course, the amount of information available online continues to grow, with web articles also benefiting from the viral effect of social media. But the fact remains that the mainstream press keeps its own specificity.

Also of interest is the comparison of the content of the national papers’ websites with Google News. Up to 25% of the information available directly from these websites is not transmitted through Google News, or transmitted hours or days later after it’s published. There are many reasons for this difference, all related to the way the search engine works: when Google News or similar like Bing, Yahoo!, etc., crawls websites it doesn’t retain all of the information available. It excludes articles not dated, doesn’t re-crawl content that has been updated by publishers and doesn’t visit many subscription websites.

Too many traditional PR and public affairs firms are stuck in the twentieth century when it comes to comprehensive media monitoring while charging you twentieth first century fees.

All this means that one cannot consider Google and Bing News as a tool with which to conduct exhaustive media monitoring. It is certainly a useful service for rough research, but comprehensive and relevant coverage remains the preserve of dedicated and professional media monitoring companies.

About Influentials Network
Influentials Network (IN) is a political news web platform that uses an intelligent news aggregator, curator, and dynamic platform for political enthusiast and professionals who want all their political and public policy news in one, always-updating website. It is also the gateway to the INlocal Network: real-time local political news and content from key cities around the US.