Is Media Monitoring really that Challenging?

Hi all,

I am almost coming to an end of my internship and I am feeling sad already. Along with drafting media releases for the first few times, another challenging issue that I encountered was media monitoring and I have also come to realise that Media Monitoring is not always fun. If you remember well, on my first post I said I liked doing media monitoring but now after this long I see how challenging of a work it is and it needs to be done with much care and attention. The thing the first few times I was only checking if there was anything about my organisation or its events and then digital press cutting for media clipping.

                     My table filled with the piles of newspapers (The Observer, Le Matinal, L`Express, Le Defi Quotidien, Star, News on Sunday, Weekend, Le Mauricien, Defi Plus, Mauritius Times, Express Dimanche, 5-Plus,Sunday Times, Capital, Samdi Plus, People, Business Magazine, Weekly Magazine)


But now as time flew and we are reaching to almost and end of the year, I have realised it is also important to know what your competitors are up to and record those as well. So now imagine every time I attend work the first thing that I have to do is read and srutinize over 15 newspapers/magazines to not only look for articles about your organisation but also for that of your competitors. This not only tracks the effectiveness of your organisation`s communication but also keeps you up to date about what your competitors are doing. So among all so far I found it really challenging as it needed attention to details while reading almost the whole newspapers so as not to miss anything. It even happened to me that I had to go trice thru the same newspaper to cross-check if i have not previously missed anything as I had to record whatever I have come across to into our 'research and analysis' folder to see the positioning of our organisation and that of our competitors. A matter of fact is that the angle of the story more often reflect the relationship between the journalist and the PR person. One of the reasons for why I found this to be challenging is because you have to read and understand the articles to be able to record it later. And many often it happened that after first few times of reading I still was not able to understand certain articles on our competitors because of the jargons used. So yeah, it was really a tough job and to start your day with piles of newspapers and after reading scrutising, start with the press-clipping; it is definitely not easy and takes a lot of your time.

However, I have realised that this is the real PR world and this reflects how our future will be. It is said a good PR does nothing but everything and Now having done all those I can proudly say it is true :D 

No matter how difficult it is, Media monitoring is very important in PR.  

Please find some sample newspaper and some articles about our clients below.  Thank you.

                                This is all the newspapers I had to go through for media monitoring

                                       Article on Bramer Bank who is one of our major clients

                                     While doing media monitoring, I stumbled upon one of our Press Releases

Thank you for reading :) I guess by now everyone is coming to and end of their internship so good luck with the report.

Karishma Rughoonundun
15636461
CTI Mauritius