Free and paid news monitoring services

News Monitoring and analysis means checking the news related to your business to estimate your brand’s popularity and prevent reputation crises.

Plus, news tracking helps measure the effectiveness of your ads and PR activities, track your competition, and spot new players in your niche.

In this process, there are many news monitoring tools that you can use.

While Newsdata.io news API automatically crawls and indexes data on the web, and many news monitoring services definitely use news API to retrieve requested news data from the web and find your news mentions on news sites and their social media pages for a search, a few keywords are associated with your company:

brand or product names, the full name of the CEO, certain hashtags.

The more options you add to define your query (for example, you can specify your language and location), the more accurate the results will be.

1. Free news monitoring services

First, there are free online news monitoring services, usually supported by advertising. The leader is Google News.

It provides reasonably good coverage of news sources with the help of Google news API but is not as extensive as paid subscription services.

The Google News service will send you daily email news alerts with articles containing the keywords you specify.

But there are downsides to free online news monitoring services that require users to invest a lot of time searching for clips.

With Google News, neither email alerts nor organic searches provide all clips. Google uses its algorithms to provide only what it considers to be the most relevant or important articles (clips).

For “market information” purposes, this may be sufficient. For the monitoring and measurement of public relations, this is sorely lacking.

To get all the international clips in Google News or to follow more than 10, keywords or phrases, you have to do multiple searches every day — a long and tedious process for staff.

And if you enter over searches each day, you are definitely getting redundant clips in the search results. Staff will need to manually filter duplicate clips.

Google News’ Boolean search capabilities are not as advanced as most paid subscription services. As a result, the free service often provides superfluous or irrelevant items, especially if you are looking for corporate brand names or items similar to other companies in other industries.

Google News also limits searches to a maximum of 10 keywords.

Google News and other free news monitoring services do not include a way to store the delivered clips.

To archive the clips, a staff member will have to cut and paste the clips into a database or spreadsheet — a tedious and time-consuming task — or print each item, an expensive proposition (especially in color).

Google News also doesn’t provide metric/delivery data, so it’s almost impossible to measure PR success (with the exception of a number of clips, the least important PR metric).

However, for many small and medium-sized organizations, news search engines such as Google News or Yahoo News provide sufficient coverage and functionality.

A free search engine may meet your needs if you only have a few searches terms, you usually only get a few clips a day, you don’t need any data or measurement tools, and you are willing to invest the time to do more research every day.

Free research services, however, are not really free. They can be quite expensive in terms of the time required to perform daily searches.

Since free news monitoring services do not store your clips like most subscription media monitoring services do, there is also the cost of transferring clips from search engine results to a database or spreadsheet and the cost of printing the clips later.

Finding and managing such paper clips is more difficult and time-consuming than digital clip subscription services stored in a fully searchable online database.

Using RSS feeds will help minimize the time spent by staff monitoring the media.

2. Paid news monitoring services

Subscription online news monitoring services, including the major CyberAlert, CustomScoop, and Meltwater, offer many features not offered by the free services, including

a) News delivery services, web news portals, news websites distributed organizations worldwide — all in multiple languages.

b) Automated daily search queries in multiple languages ​​for multiple countries with virtually unlimited search terms.

c) Advanced logical boolean to minimize unnecessary or irrelevant clips.

d) Digital online clip archive for archiving, searching, and managing clips.

e) Instant software translation of foreign language clips.

f) Relationship measurement data public attached to each press clip.

g) Dynamically created media graphs and metrics.

h) Customized functions to meet specific needs.

Customized news monitoring capabilities can ensure you get exactly the news coverage you want with minimal investment in staff time.

Want only snippets from a personalized list of specific publications — not all news sources? Do you want only “important” articles, not all of your search terms?

Do you have special delivery requirements like delivery of clips on working day or XML format? Do you prefer RSS delivery? Would you like the clips to be delivered at a specific or unusual time each day?

Do you just want a copy of the same story, say a press release? Would you like the clips to be delivered to more people?

Do you want the clips to be automatically placed in a separate email and archive folders for different customers or brands? Want clips edited and bundled into a daily or weekly executive briefing?

Would you like all news clips to be edited by human readers before delivery in order to absolutely and positively eliminate unwanted clips? Most online watch specialists offer these personalized services.

Traditional press reviews such as Luce di Burrelle or Cision also offer online news monitoring services. But don’t let press review services sell you both press reviews and online news monitoring.

Almost all articles from the print editions of newspapers, magazines, and trade magazines also appear in the online edition of this publication.

Some small community newspapers (mainly weekly) and some professional journals (mainly medical and academic) do not publish all of their print content on the Internet, but this is rare.

In fact, abstracts from the medical journals are also available online at PubMed, a free service of the National Library of Medicine.

If there are print publications that are really important to you and are not published on the web, ask the press review service to monitor only those print publications — and everything else online — so that avoid duplicate clips and variable escalating costs.