Archive for the ‘Clippings/Monitoring’ Category

The business of monitoring news “clippings” has changed radically in the last 10 years, but it hasn’t necessarily evolved. At the moment, the industry is a mess. The large, national, full-service monitoring companies like Burrelles-Luce, Vocus and Cision are losing ground because, in collecting web coverage, they’re not offering enough value over the free alternative of Google News.

A lot of public relations professionals have started paying less attention to print clippings on a national basis. That’s opened the door for cheaper web-only monitoring alternatives (anywhere from $1,000 to $4,000 per year). However, these services  have a hard time competing with Google’s search capabilities. They all claim to cover more media and to have better software, but I recently ran head-to-head tests of several of these services compared with Google News. In almost every case, Google did a better job for free.

For print coverage, I’ve taken a step 10 years into the past. Because most of my media relation projects are state-specific — though scattered around the country — I’ve gone back to hiring local clipping services. Remember those? They’re the ones who hire readers to literally read and clip the newspapers. That may seem quaint, but print coverage is still important to some clients. Recently, I got a month’s clippng service in Illinois for $65. They clipped the papers, emailed the scans, and I passed them on to the client. Great bargain. Easy. And it’s a simple matter to allocate the cost to the specific project.

The elephant in the room of the industry is the virtual certainty that news media will quit giving away their news for free. That means the free ride on Google will come to an end at some point, and we’ll either have to pay for the stories or use a paid service that has the necessary subscriptions. It’ll be a while before the new “paid content” models take shape.

For now, the wise course is not to sign any long-term monitoring contracts and not to make any long-term promises based on the current shape of things, because the only certainty is that is going to change rapidly.