In this digital world where every mention counts —News article, a blog post, a TV broadcast, or tweets- keeping a finger on the pulse of public opinion, media narratives, etc is important. Tracking media sources, both traditional and digital, is possible with an effective media monitoring service.

Monitoring the output of the print, online, and broadcast media is known as media monitoring. It can be done for various interests like social, commercial, or academic grounds.

News Monitoring

Getting news in time, being updated is very important to run business properly. News monitoring is definitely a part of our everyday work. In some situations the price of a missing news article would be too high, thus we try to keep an eye on relevant subjects and not to miss anything important. Is it possible to track all news from thousands websites? Yes. Today we have some very simple and powerful tools that allow us to track news fast and effective.

RSS.

Wikipedia said,

RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a feed, web feed, or channel, contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that’s easier than checking them manually.

In other words, RSS gives you a possibility to collect websites you visit regularly to your customized newspaper. You can read new entries from your favorite sites within one program or at one web application instead of visiting every single website separately. Alexandra Samuel wrote a perfect guide -- 10 simple, painless steps to becoming an RSS user. I don't want to retell her article here, just would strongly recommend reading it.

This is how I use RSS for news tracking:

First of all, I added about 30 feeds of the the most noteworthy news sites to my RSS reader (special program or web service for aggregating RSS feeds).

I turned on "Check all feed once an hour" option in program settings, because some feeds may contain not all new entries, but last 10, so I asked RSS reader to check for updates every 60 minutes.

I set my RSS reader to start automatically on system start up -- it keeps running in the system tray displaying a number of new entries as they arrive.

Three or two times a day I open the RSS reader and look through the news; some feed entries contain a title, short excerpt and a link to the full article on the web. If a news seems important, I opened it in my browser.

I spend about 30 minutes a day reading hundreds news from dozens of websites. Just imagine, every 60 minutes my RSS reader checks each of 30 websites for updates. I'd have no time for any other work if I did it manually, but it takes me only 30 minutes a day!

ChangeDetection

Imagine, you're interested in, say, pharmaceutical market. You might need to read earning reports of the most influent pharmaceutical companies. You know where these companies publish their reports at, however, you don't know when exactly they update their websites. Unfortunately most these websites do not provide with RSS feeds. So you could add these websites to your bookmarks and visit them five times a day in order not to miss important information. Is there any way to optimize your work? Actually there is one.

You can automatically monitor any web page for updates with the help of ChangeDetection. It is as easy as 1-2-3: click the link at this page to open a ChangeDetection wizard, put the URL of the web page you want to monitor and your email on the pop-up form. That's it. You'll get an alarm from ChangeDetection as soon as the page is updated.

I use ChangeDetection to monitor four or five pages for changes. It’s not too many, I could do it manually, however, I don't trust my memory. I’m sure, I’d forget to visit these websites and check for updates. You know, there are so many interesting things to do, let’s robots do routine work!

Google Alerts

Nobody can know about every news site on the Web. Even Google doesn't know about all news sites. However, Google bots know and track many more sources than any Internet user has ever visited. Google Alerts service is the best solution for those who don't want to miss any important news.