It is hard to believe that another year is coming to an end, but at the same time it also feels like the last 18 months were a few decades long. All in all, 2021 was an exciting and great year at Newz Group. We rolled out some exciting changes, not only for our media monitoring clients, but also on our newspaper archiving side. In 2021, Newz Group celebrated it’s twenty fifth year in business. From the very beginning, our goal was to provide the most comprehensive newspaper monitoring on the market alongside newspaper archiving with the most up to date processes.

2021 was a year of exciting change and growth, read below to learn more!

One of the most exciting events of 2021 was rolling out the new and improved client portal, Newz Room in April of 2021. Our development team worked on this project for almost a year, and it was fantastic to see it come to life and be used by our staff and clients.

The improved Newz Room remains extremely user friendly but has a plethora of new features that allow clients to locate and read the news articles they need faster, create custom reports and analytics. One of the features we were most excited to debut was the Topic Tracker. With the Topic Tracker users can easily set up organizational parameters that will allow news mentions to automatically sort into their respective folders.

Like most organizations in America, in 2020 we had to pivot to remote working, put our normal company traditions on hold, and readjust how we approach almost every aspect of the business. Even though the pandemic is still very much a part of our lives and on our minds, in 2021 we were slowly able to start returning to normal.

In spring of 2021, some of the team met up to perform a trash pick up on our adopted highway. For some of us, it was the first time we had seen each other face to face in over a year. In May of 2021, we celebrated the college graduations of staff members, Levi, Adam, and Evan. We are excited to see where life takes them, even though we are sad they have moved on from Newz Group.

Our Chief Content Officer, Amy Fritz, and Director of Business Development, Jenn Langdon attended the Missouri Press Association convention in September. This was our first convention trip since the start of the pandemic, and it was nice to see our Press Association and newspaper colleagues from across the state.

In November Newz Group held our 14^th annual Chili Cook-off.  Even though we had to suspend the cook-off in 2020, our team can still cook up some delicious chili! We also got together earlier this month for an in person, Christmas party!

When Newz Group was founded in 1997, newspaper monitored looked a lot different. When results were found, they were cut or ‘clipped’ from the paper, glued to cardstock, complied in a book and sent to the client. Even though the process has changed over the years, the foundation of traditional newspaper monitoring remains the same, the source material Newz Group uses is still newspapers in their hardcopy form. Since 1997 Newz Group has pioneered digital receipt and delivery of content, however, unlike online monitoring, which is performed by algorithms, traditional print monitoring still requires humans at every step in the process; this can cause delays in getting results to you.

One of our main goals in 2021 was to find and put in place solutions to get our clients coverage quicker. To achieve this, we worked with our press association partners across America to shift from newspapers mailing editions to Newz Group to be scanned and processed, to having all publications uploaded to our servers directly when the publications go to print.  These changes eliminates many weeks of wait time for both our clients and for the press associations as well.

Additionally,  the new processes are much more environmentally sustainable, and also reduces costs the newspapers incur when they mail in hard-copy editions.

This has been an exciting change and we are looking forward to completing this project in early 2022. In addition to the production changes, in 2021 Newz Group also promoted several long-term employees. Ian Buchanan succeeded Brad Buchanan as President and CEO of Newz Group as of August 1st, 2021. Ian has been with Newz Group since 2008 and has been serving as Vice President since 2013. Amy Fritz is now serving as the Chief Content Officer. Amy has been with Newz Group since 2003 and was previously the Operations Director. Ben Buchanan was named Vice President of Finance. Ben has been with Newz Group since 2008 and was previously the Director of Resources.

Outro & final thoughts and things to look forward to in 2022.

Best Wishes,

Ian Buchanan, CEO of Newz Group

Celebrating its 25th year, Newz Group provides state press associations with publisher support and archiving services alongside the most comprehensive newspaper monitoring in the greater Midwest. Newz Group is the primary media monitoring source for over 1/3 of American newspapers. For more information visit: www.newzgroup.com