Part III: How to Select a Media Monitoring Service

By William Comcowich

What’s the role of broadcast news monitoring, sometimes referred to as TV news monitoring, in an overall corporate media monitoring program? When should you use a broadcast monitor? How do you go about selecting a broadcast monitoring service?

Broadcast Monitoring: TV News

While most print publications now publish online, the same is not true of live TV news broadcasts.

Online news monitoring services can track and deliver news articles on the websites of TV networks and local TV stations – but not live TV newscasts, at least not with the same online software.

Live newscasts in the U.S. are best monitored through closed caption feeds or full video recordings. Live TV newscast monitoring is available from specialist broadcast monitoring companies.

In the U.S., the broadcast monitoring specialists are Video Monitoring Service (VMS), TVEyes, and Critical Mention. The News Data Service (NDS) cooperative of local independent broadcast monitors also offers access to news broadcasts and magazine/talk shows of TV networks and local TV affiliates. Each of the independent local NDS affiliates can access the entire video database of 210 markets. All the broadcast monitors offer some form of streaming video clips of TV news programs.

Some online news services including CyberAlert monitor the closed caption text of TV stations and deliver a text file of all clips, not streaming video. They can also order video clips of specific news stories. The online services offer the advantage of integrated news monitoring where you receive both online and TV news clips in the same daily clip report with the same clip archive, typically at lower cost than the dedicated broadcast monitors.

The major press clipping services, Burrelle’sLuce and Cision, offer TV news monitoring in affiliation with VMS and Critical Mention, respectively.

The specialized broadcast monitoring services all offer essentially the same service – but vary in market coverage and bells & whistles features.

Essentially, the services monitor the news programs on all the TV news networks and most local TV stations in all (or most all) 210 U.S. markets. The broadcast monitoring companies record the closed caption text of the news program – that’s the federally mandated text of the audio for use by the hearing impaired that you often see on sports programs in bars where it’s not possible to hear the audio — and they record the full video and audio tracks.

The broadcast monitors then assemble the closed caption text into a searchable database for each day’s news programming. With software similar to Google’s online search engine, they can search that text database for virtually any key word or phrase including but not limited to corporate, brand or executive names each day, then find and deliver the video clips to their subscribers.

The technology of broadcast monitoring is quite good, but it does have some glitches. The quality of the closed caption searching capabilities differs from monitor to monitor. About 80% of any given newscast will be covered by closed caption text, including all of the commentary that the news anchor is reading from a Teleprompter. Closed caption text is often missing on live remote commentary by field reporters. If a key word is mentioned during a “live remote”, the monitoring service may miss the clip. Since the services monitor text, they usually miss any visual references, the McDonald’s sign or Nike symbols on uniforms, for instance.

Unlike online news monitoring where misspellings are rare, closed caption text – usually typed by humans often on the fly in real time – contains quite a few misspellings. In broadcast monitoring, it’s therefore important to search for common misspellings of corporate, brand and executive names.

Most broadcast monitors now offer streaming video and online search engines for their subscriber clients. With streaming video, the recorded audio/video tracks are available to be seen online by subscribers very shortly after the live broadcast. The broadcast monitoring service automatically monitors for key words requested by clients and delivers e-mail or text alerts when it identifies a new clip. In addition, most services permit subscribers themselves to enter search terms to quickly find stories on additional topics.
Who Should Subscribe to a Broadcast Monitoring Service?

Not all organizations require an ongoing subscription to a broadcast monitoring service – which typically cost $500/mo or more.

If your organization typically appears only on local TV news programs a few times per year, then a subscription service is probably unnecessary. In these cases, you’ll likely know about the TV news story in advance or one of your employees or friends will have seen the TV news story. In addition to employees, friends and family, the online news monitoring service you use may also pick up on online reference to the story from the website of the local TV station.
If you learn about a TV news story that has appeared about your organization and you’d like to see it, you can contact one of the broadcast monitoring services and ask if the have the story and can supply you with a clip. Typically, the local broadcast monitoring affiliate of the News Data Service is the most likely to have the story since they are closest to the local market, will be the most cooperative in finding the story and copying the clip, and likely charge the lowest price.

There will be a charge for the transcript of the closed caption text and a larger fee for a video clip, usually delivered as a downloadable MP3 file or on a DVD.

For national organizations with more than a modest number of TV media clips per month, an ongoing subscription to a broadcast monitoring service is likely a good investment to assure the organization is up to date on all the news being broadcast about the organization and its brands in U.S. markets. In times of PR crisis such as a product recall, broadcast monitoring is an essential service to keep up-to-the-minute on all reports and be able to respond in a timely way.

For companies with large numbers of TV clips each year, subscription services that charge a fixed monthly rate with no per clip fee offer the best value.

Broadcast Monitoring: Radio News & Talk

Radio is more difficult to monitor than TV. There are far more stations more widely dispersed. There is no closed caption text.

If you know a person is going to appear on a radio talk show and you want a recording, the interviewee can ask the station for a copy, or you can contact National Aircheck in advance and they will arrange to record the interview over the air. National Aircheck also records all the news programming on all news stations in major cities and many of the nationally syndicated talk radio shows, as does Video Monitoring Service (VMS). If you know what you want – say the Sunday 10:00 am news on WCBS all news radio in New York – they can probably deliver it.

Monitoring on a continuing basis for corporate or brand mentions, however, is more problematic. The companies use speech to text software to produce transcriptions of the news – but… and there are buts: the software, though it has gotten much better in the past few years, is still less than 80% accurate (even less if the speaker has an accent) and, in the whole scheme of things, the radio monitoring services don’t monitor very many stations, concentrating on all news/talk radio stations in major markets.

Once you have decided what you want to cover – and have made a list of the broadcast monitoring services of interest to you – you can start contacting and vetting potential vendors.

Include in your assessment the national broadcast monitoring companies such as Critical Mention, TVEyes, and Video Monitoring Service. The broadcast monitoring service located in your city may be a good place to start, especially if it’s affiliated with News Data Service which enables the local company to provide national coverage. Unfortunately, the websites of the International Association of Broadcast Monitors and News Data Service do not allow customers to search for the names of the local broadcast monitoring companies by city. At the moment, the best way to find a local independent broadcast monitor is the Google search engine with the search term “broadcast monitoring services” AND “name of city”.

© Copyright 2010, CyberAlert, Inc.
Article may be reprinted in whole or in part with proper attribution and a hyperlink to CyberAlert, Inc. (www.cyberalert.com)