Top 8 News and Media Monitoring Tools For Publishers

The news industry never sleeps! But unlike print media that gets time to curate news, its digital counterpart has to cover events as they unfold. Among this constant flurry of breaking news there is a constant race among digital publishers to be the first to report it. Afterall the early bird gets the worm, right?

In order to be among the first to break news, newsrooms have to constantly keep hunting for it. While some publications keep a tab on the competition, a few others resort to checking Google News and social media platforms. Tracking social media posts can be a great way to find news, but with so much information on these platforms, it can get overwhelming to keep track of everything. This is where Media monitoring tools come in that use Artificial Intelligence(AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to keep track of news.

News and media monitoring tools are designed to help news publishers monitor and analyze the vast amounts of data available on the internet, including news articles, social media, and other online content. By using media monitoring platforms, news publishers can:

• Gain valuable insights into their audience
• Track their competitors
• Stay on top of breaking news stories
• Analyze media mentions of their brand, competitors, or topics.

If you are looking to explore these monitoring tools, we’ve put together a list of the best media monitoring tools in the market. Use these to get an edge over the competition.

Top News and Media Monitoring Tools

1. Newzdash

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Newzdash is a media monitoring tool that helps individuals and organizations like Forbes and Sports Illustrated stay on top of news and media coverage related to their brand, industry, and interests.

Top Features:

• They track latest news every 15-30 minutes and store all historic data.
• They collect data from Google Trends, Google Real-Time Trends, Google News and a wide range of sources, including online news outlets, blogs, forums, social media, and broadcast media.
• Easily set up customized alerts and optimize trends information for specific, related entities & keywords.
• Real-time ranking and visibility tracker
• Track any topic/ news site from any country/language on Google News

Overall, Newzdash is an effective media monitoring tool because it provides users with comprehensive coverage, customizable alerts, sentiment analysis, competitor analysis, and data visualization tools, all in one platform. This helps users stay informed and make data-driven decisions related to their brand, industry, or interests.

Newsdash offers a 14-day free trial. It offers three plans, Lite (for small newsrooms), Niche (for local news sites or single vertical site), and Enterprise (for newsrooms covering multiple verticals).

2. NewsDashboard

NewsDashboard is a media monitoring service that assists publishers in finding relevant topics or breaking news by using keyword queries. It specifically helps users to rank in google news and top stories on SERP. While NewsDashboard does not disclose its pricing options, it does offer a seven-day demo.

Top Features:

• Keywords and rank tracking every 15 minutes
• Analyze your performance in Google News, News Boxes and organic links on the SERPs
• See your lost rankings and missing topics in one view and raise your visibility through optimization
• Use your visibility to build your SEO strategy
• Identifies keyword gaps and optimization ideas

3. Google Trends

Google Trends is one of the most popular and useful tools for media monitoring as it allows publishers to track the popularity and interest of specific keywords or topics over time. By analyzing search data from Google, publishers can gain insights into the latest trends and stay up-to-date with breaking news stories.

The data on Google Trends is limited to search volumes, and not on social media or other sources. It does not provide in-depth analysis or insights into the reasons behind particular trends. However, newsrooms can use this to ascertain the search volume of one keyword compared to another.

Top Features:

• Real-time data tracking capabilities.
• Track changes in search volumes for specific keywords or topics.
• Filter data by region or time period. Analyze data at a local, national, or global level.
• Compare search volumes for different brands or organizations. This feature can help publishers identify emerging trends and gain a competitive advantage.

4. Meltwater

Meltwater is a great social listening tool that uses advanced algorithms and machine learning to give publishers insights into media coverage and social media activity related to their brand or industry. They do not offer a free trial. Publishers can request a demo and get a quote as per their requirements.

Top Features:

• Monitor and analyze news from multiple sources like social media, TV, radio, podcasts, and more.
• Sentiment analysis to determine user intent.
• Efficient keyword research to track trending news and events
• Customizable alerts and custom dashboards
• Powerful analytics and metrics (customer and competitor).

5. Dataminr

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Dataminr is one of the best real-time media monitoring tools making it well-suited for the public and news sector including Aljazeera, The Washington Post, and the Daily Mail.

To maintain a competitive edge, Dataminr analyzes over 500,000 public sources and delivers information about a chosen keyword or location to publishers. The sources can include various media formats, such as text, images, sound, and videos.

Top Features:

• Early alerts to help you stay proactive in covering news stories
• Multiple platforms to receive alerts, including web-based dashboard, email, mobile app, Slack, and TweetDeck.
• Geo-visualizer allows journalists and publishers to track events unfolding nearby at a broader scale
• Get access to news from more than 500,000 public sources

6. Isentia

Isentia is a media intelligence and insights platform that offers a wide range of features to help businesses and organizations monitor, analyze, and measure their media presence.

Top Features:

• Tracks a wide range of media sources such as print, online, broadcast, and social media platforms.
• Improved accessibility and easier-to-use data to help tracking messages, issues and audience sentiment across channels.
• Real-time rich media analytics for tracking keywords, industry, and topics.

7. Keytrends

Keytrends offers a service combining AI technology with user research to produce distinctive, multi-channel content. It is a distinct media monitoring tool that allows users to track and analyze trends in media coverage of particular topics or keywords. The tool scans news from various sources, including mainstream media outlets, blogs, and social media platforms. Then it uses machine learning algorithms to identify and track trends in the data.

Top Features:

• Over 30 templates utilizing GPT3.5 to accelerate content writing.
• Reearch your audience and competition quickly
• Trend detection feature to generate content ideas based on the latest trends from Google Trends.
• Sentiment analysis to help newsrooms track user perception of the topics they’ve covered.
• Multi-channel content strategy to determine the most searched trends.
• My Search Console Data to monitor your website's search performance

It comes with a freemium model. The paid versions offer some additional features such as alerts, URL site inspector, priority support, AI workflow and AI writing training.

HARO (Help A Reporter Out)

HARO (Help A Reporter Out) is a public relations marketing tool designed to assist journalists and reporters in finding reliable information on various topics. It is a popular tool used by the likes of Fox News, Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, and TIME magazine.

Users can submit their inquiries through email and receive potential sources from other media entities. The platform also enables publishers to pitch their stories to journalists.

HARO also offers some typical functionalities of a media monitoring tool, such as keyword tracking. HARO is a free-to-use tool for media monitoring. For advanced keyword tracking, there are three paid options: $19 per month for one keyword, $49 per month for three keywords, and $149 per month for unlimited tracking.

Top Features:

• Free to use for both journalists and sources.
• Get trending information on hot topics from experts.
• Large and diverse user base helps journalists reach the right expert
• Maintain privacy and security standards.
• Pitch individually to journalists.

The explosion of digital media channels and the sheer volume of content generated every day make it impossible for news publishers to keep track of everything. News and media monitoring tools offer a solution to this problem by providing real-time alerts for keyword and topics they wish to cover by looking for coverage across a range of channels, including social media, news outlets, and blogs.

In addition, media monitoring tools have become more sophisticated in recent years, offering features such as AI-powered sentiment analysis, image recognition, and competitor tracking. Media monitoring is essential for publishers to track breaking news better and stay ahead of the competition.