A media monitoring service provides clients with new material (written, audio or visual) which refers to them.

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

In the past, the mass media had consisted almost solely of printed matter, so monitoring the press was the chief activity of such agencies. But with radio, television and the Internet now providing output of interest to their clients the services have expanded their activities.

Typically, a client (either an individual or an organisation - such as a charity or corporation) approaches a media monitoring service to keep track of what is being said about them.

Illustrative example

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 programmes, televison programmes and so on.

The author will receive a printed bundle of clippings, ie the bits of the magazines and newspapers relating to them and their book. They may also receive recordings of any radio reviews, television programmes and so on, in which they feature.

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.

External links

Durrants - a British media monitoring service