Media Monitoring Is Broken — Its expensive, outdated and designed to serve vendors – not communicators
The future of news tracking must be smarter, faster, and built for the user.
For over two decades, media monitoring has been a necessary evil in the world of public relations and corporate communication. Necessary — because brands and agencies can’t afford to miss what’s being said about them, and because latest news is a way of keeping ahead. evil. Technology and AI are changing the world, but keeping media monitoring stagnant, is like ensuring the radar of a battleship remains broke. Now that’s evil for sure.
Today, most professionals — from PR executives to brand heads — are still using tools built in the early 2000s, layered with cosmetic upgrades but burdened by the same fundamental issues: slow, expensive, inflexible, and increasingly irrelevant in a world that runs in real-time.
There’s No Real Alternative — That’s the Problem
Most agencies and clients continue to use legacy media monitoring services not because they love them, but because they don’t know what else to do. It’s a classic case of visual and intellectual inertia.
They’re used to their daily mails with news links, to the dashboards they log into once a week, and to the idea that “monitoring” is something someone else does for them. Change requires effort, and no one wants to be the one to invest in change. But that inertia has a cost — and it’s paid in money, time, and missed opportunity.
The Tools Are Built for Retention, Not Utility
Media monitoring agencies have perfected the art of locking clients in. High retainers, fixed contracts, one-dashboard-fits-all platforms, and limited flexibility ensure dependence. Want to add a new keyword mid-month? That’ll be an extra charge. Want vernacular coverage? We’ll “try”. The media monitoring available today is usurious, and PR agencies are constrained by the keyword-based retainer model of monitoring agencies.
Keywords are ideas in PR and without quick and constant media monitoring changes there’s no room for agility in PR. No keyword changes also means not allowing the agency to be creative. Whereas today’s PR or marketing professional requires operating in a high-speed, multi-stakeholder multi-idea world. News is breaking every 15 minutes — not just at 10 AM when your clip mailer arrives.
What We Really Want: A Wishlist That Actually Works
If you gave PR professionals and brand custodians the chance to dream, here’s what their wishlist for news monitoring would look like:
- 📍 Keyword control — I decide what to track and when.
- 📩 Mail alerts — only if I want them. No spam, no inbox stuffing.
- ⚡ Real-time updates — Not batch reports.
- 🗂️ Sector-based summaries — Help me see the bigger picture, not just keyword crumbs.
- 🧠 Smart filtering — AI that understands what not to show me.
- 💸 Affordable for all — Not just Fortune 500s and global agencies.
- 📱 Mobile-first & intuitive — Built for how we work today, not how we worked in 2010.
Media Monitoring for Everyone — Not Just Big Budgets
Monitoring shouldn’t be a specialist task outsourced to a vendor who charges a small fortune for it. It should be democratized, like Gmail or WhatsApp or Canva. If you’re a freelance PR consultant handling 3 clients, you should have access to real-time tracking. If you’re a student researcher, you should be able to track public sentiment.
One should not have to spend Rs. 5,000 or Rs.10,000 per month, but instead less than Rs. 1000/- per year for as many key words as one wanted.
We don’t need better media monitoring agencies. We need a whole new mindset.
The Bottom Line: Stop Settling
If you feel that your current media tracking system is underwhelming, you’re not wrong.
If you feel that you’re paying too much for too little, you’re absolutely right.
And if you’ve ever thought, “There has to be a better way…” — you’re not alone.
The truth is, media monitoring hasn’t just stagnated — it’s failed to keep up with the world it’s supposed to track.
Google Alerts Wasn’t the Answer — But It Was the Dream
I wish Google alerts were really as they promised – as soon as the news appeared. The ideal media monitoring would be if your keyword news were instantly accessible to you so you can act on it. I also wish it had a summary, and an ability to monitor multiple client keywords at one place. I wish I could see only what I wanted, and I wish I could sector news summaries to forward to clients in a jiffy.
The ideal media monitoring is what professional wished Google Alerts could be but failed.
It’s time to build something new.
Something fast. Flexible. Affordable. User-first.
And it’s coming soon.
News That Matters
One Feed. Every Perspective.