How News Monitoring Works

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Modified on: Mon, 21 Nov, 2022 at 8:59 PM

Understanding Monitoring:

The Next Generation Cision Comms Cloud has the ability to monitor news outlets for your articles and mentions relevant to your company, products, competitors, leadership, events,  industry terms, and more.  While news monitoring is a literal process of collecting news that matches terms within a monitoring search, the process is often better understood when comparing it to fishing.  When fishing, a rod is used to pull one fish out of a sea of many fish. In news monitoring, carefully constructed searches full of terms are used like fishing poles to pull out content matching the terms from a sea of all articles and mentions from all outlets. To reiterate, only articles and mentions that contain words or phrases that match the search terms exactly are fished out of the sea of news.

Types of Content that can be Brought In:

The Cision platform is capable of bringing in articles and mentions of the following mediums into your account. Your contract with Cision is the best resource to determine which of these mediums is monitored with your account.

• Online (openly available, nothing behind a paywall or subscription)
• Print
• Broadcast (Radio & Television)
• Social
• Podcast

More about Monitoring Searches:

Monitoring Searches within your Cision account's library are essential, as they contain the words and phrases used to automatically bring relevant articles and mentions into your account on an ongoing basis.  Monitoring searches are responsible for all the content you see in your system, whether in a list view of earned coverage, analytics dashboard, or report.  Further, the data displayed in each analytics dashboard or widget is a direct function of the monitoring search attached to that widget.

What is an article?

In short, an article is a piece of published content that contains a headline, content, and a publish date. Cision standards for an article or blog post are maintained to set guidelines for what kind of content can be considered earned media or a valid article. This rules out advertisements, bot content, low-value search engine bait, static web pages, and common online spam content. For online content to be considered an article by Cision standards and for it to be indexed into the platform, it must conform to a short set of guidelines.  

It is often easiest to clarify what is meant by an earned media article by looking at a list of published content types that we would not consider to be an article. 

You can click here: to learn more about what qualifies an article as earned media content available to be brought in by Cision monitoring.