Before the era of digital news and information, news clipping was a labor-intensive process that played a crucial role in how organizations found their news coverage. News clipping services canvased sometimes 300+ newspapers in a single state to find and extract articles related to keywords an organization wanted to know about.
It’s easiest to think of news clipping like the process of scrapbooking, where you are cutting out the parts you care about from larger works (like an entire newspaper)and putting this collection of important newspaper articles, all in one place to consume quickly or share.
The Birth of News Clipping
The early 1800s saw a rapid rise in the circulation of newspapers, due to the invention of the printing press, and with it demand for more news. The printing press gave publications the ability to go from printing editions once a week to dailies. With this growing amount of content, readers began to desire a way to find and save important articles. Initially, readers would meticulously cut out articles of interest using scissors, carefully preserving them in personal archives. This manual process was time-consuming but allowed individuals to curate their own personalized collections of news stories. Thus, the service news clipping was born.
Delivery of Newspaper Clips
The original delivery method for relevant news matches would be delivered by mail. Clipping services would collect newspapers from across a state/region/nation and manually read and cut out articles relevant to a client/organization. Those clipped articles would then be glued on sheets of paper (much like scrapbooking) with the publication name, date, and page information above that article and then that collection of pages/results would be mailed to the client/organizations office.
Paper to Digital Delivery
In the 2000’s we witnessed a digital revolution that transformed nearly every aspect of society, including news consumption. News clipping, too, underwent a digital transformation, with news results from newspapers being scanned in digitally to deliver the results via email, and remove the delay of mail transit times.
The Rise of Online News and Social Media
Today, news clipping has evolved beyond professional newspaper clipping services. Online news, blogs and social media platforms have grown to expand discussions beyond traditional newspapers, enabling the rapid dissemination of information quickly. These digital platforms have also allowed companies to see coverage in real time, as the information is publicly available. News clipping services have integrated online news, blog and social media platforms into their monitoring portfolios, and this more expansive curation of topics important to an organization across all these mediums is called Media Monitoring.
A Blend of the Past and Present
News clipping has come a long way, from its humble origins as a manual cutting, pasting, and mailing process, to the present digitalized delivery system. Although the tools and techniques have evolved, the underlying desire to understand and share information remains unchanged. News clipping remains a necessary service, providing organizations with the ability to see their media coverage across a growing number of media channels, when they do not have the time or resources to find this information themselves.
Newz Group was the original pioneer of newspaper clipping in the United States almost 30 years ago, and continues to deliver more local and regional news coverage than any other Media Monitoring provider. Newz Group continues the tradition of traditional newspaper clipping, while also using innovative technologies to find important conversations happening about businesses across all media landscapes.
Learn more about media monitoring: https://newzgroup.com/media-monitoring-services/
Do you want to understand more about related topics?: https://blog.newzgroup.com/
