What is News Clipping?
A quick explanation:
News clipping, also known as “press clipping,” is the process of identifying and “clipping” a news article from a printed newspaper.
Before the Radio, TV and the internet, when organizations wanted to know what was being said about them in the news, they would have to read through newspapers to find those mentions. Gathering all the newspapers from every area they operated in was time-consuming, and it took even more time to sift through them to find relevant coverage.
This blog post will break down how this process has evolved and the benefits of this process in a digital age.
News Clipping / Press Clipping Importance:
The process of identifying news coverage across printed newspapers is much harder than finding mentions in digital mediums. How does an organization even get the newspapers from all of the communities they serve? This process sounds like a logistics nightmare for businesses or marketing teams, but if you rely only on online search results for your organization’s news coverage, you are likely missing coverage from several small communities you service.
Newspapers are often the sole source for local news in rural and small communities. This is because these smaller newspaper publications either don’t have a website or only offer their newspaper as electronic copies (E-Editions) to subscribers. The perception of your organization within these communities may be critical for the success of your initiatives.
How to get newspaper / press clippings?
Self / Manual Process:
If your organization operates in only one or just a handful of communities, you may have the time or the team to read through your local newspapers. First, you need to identify all of the news publications located in your community. Second, see if those news sources have websites where they publish all their news stories. Once you have identified the local publications that do not have full websites, you’ll need to subscribe to those publications’ E-Edition websites or printed editions. Meet with your team to determine what keywords your organization is interested in tracking. Lastly, identify how often you or that team will read / search for your mentions.
Online Only Services:
There are many services that have the ability to crawl online websites in search for the words you want to track. Those services can email those results to you or deliver them to an online platform you can use to access and filter your results. This option is a good solution for organizations that only need to see coverage from larger publications that have full coverage of their news stories online. Note that some large publications may have complex paywalls that may hinder a service’s ability to crawl their website. In these cases you may have to pay for a separate subscription to access these publications.
Newspaper / Press Clipping Services:
There are very few companies that source news from actual printed newspapers, because the process is more complex than writing code to look for your keywords on websites. The process for print monitoring companies typically starts by forming direct partnerships with either state press associations or directly with newspapers. The newspapers then send digital copies of their daily/weekly publications to the monitoring company, and those editions are read by employees of that company for clients’ media mentions. The matching keywords get flagged, and those articles are extracted from the full publication. Some companies have a second level review for accuracy, and then the clip is delivered to the client. Due to the amount of steps involved in the newspaper clipping process, the cost is typically more expensive than online-only monitoring.
Summary of News Clipping / Press Clipping:
News Clippings / Press Clippings are important for companies that want the full perspective of how their organization is portrayed across all the communities they serve.
Here are the quick bullet points from this blog:
- Small towns and rural communities often rely on local newspaper publications for news, but these outlets usually have limited or no online presence
- Few companies do actual newspaper monitoring due to the process involved with finding clients’ keyword mentions (Newz Group does, find out more here: https://www.newzgroup.com/press-clipping/.)
- The cost for newspaper / press clippings is typically more than digital media monitoring due to the manual process involved
