Monitoring News Coverage:
When it Comes to Online Tools,
You Get What You Pay For
A LexisNexis
®
White Paper
Highlights:
• Businessprofessionalshavecometorelyon
searchenginesandfree“newsalerts”services
tomonitornewscoverageabouttheircompany,
industryandcompetitors
• Thetruthisthatsearchenginesdonotindexall
ofthenewscontentontheWeb,andtherefore
arenotcapturingeverythingintheiralerts
• Thislackofcoverageisgettingworsedaily
asnewspublishersarerapidlymovingtheir
contentbehindpaywalls
• Newlegislationandindustryorganizations
worldwidearealsomovingtoprotectthe
economicvalueofnewscontentfromopen
Websearches
• Themosteffectivewayforbusiness
professionalstomonitornewscontentonline
istoinvestinapaidservicethataggregates
licensednewscontent,supplementingwhatis
availableontheopenWeb
Overview
Over the past two decades, the Internet has
fundamentally transformed every industry. One of the
defining characteristics of this new era in the history of
global business is that the Internet provides universal
access to all sorts of free information.
Business professionals have taken advantage of this
free information pipeline to track news coverage about
their own company and competitors with the aid of
online news portals and free “news alerts” services.
Unfortunately, many professionals have fallen prey to
a myth that is surprisingly ubiquitous: they mistakenly
assume that monitoring news coverage on the “open
Web” with search engines and other free tools, such
as Google Alerts™, is a truly comprehensive way to
discover and access nearly all of the relevant news
stories that are published.
The truth is that this has never been the case and
monitoring news coverage with free news alerts from
various search engine providers has its limitations.
These shortcomings have become so pronounced in
recent months that those who continue to rely on the
open Web and services such as Google Alerts in order
to monitor news coverage are likely missing out on a
large number of relevant news articles every day.
The purpose of this white paper is to ring an alarm
bell of sorts and to inform corporate executives about
the recent acceleration in the shortcomings of search
engines and other free tools. The lesson, which many
business professionals have learned the hard way, is
that in online research—as is so often the case in life—
you get what you pay for.
SearchEnginesNotIndexingAllNews
Content
A growing number of independent observers have
expressed frustration that the Google™ service and
other major search engines don’t monitor all news
content published on the Web. Many professionals
have anecdotally noted that free news alerts services
are often slow to push content to subscribers and
SEO bloggers have commented on the search engines’
inability to index content that is posted in certain
programming languages
1
. But the real fundamental
problem that has emerged is the obvious deterioration
in how comprehensive Google Alerts is when it comes
to monitoring online news content.
Monitoring News Coverage: When it Comes to Online Tools, You Get What You Pay For
A March 2013 “open letter” to Google Inc. specifically
addressed some serious breakdowns observed with
Google Alerts
2
, documenting an 80% decline in the
volume of Google Alerts over the past year. This caused
the publisher of The Financial Brand to “fully retract”
the publication’s prior endorsement of Google Alerts as
“an important and efficient tool to monitor mentions of
your brand on the Web.” The publisher went on to state
that Google Alerts “is now so unreliable that it has been
rendered effectively useless.”
Part of the explanation for this shortcoming is that for an
article to appear in Google Alerts, it must appear among
the top 10 results in Google News™ for the particular
search term the user entered into his or her Google
Alerts query
3
. Google News operates according to a
rigid and limited computer algorithm, so if your search
term doesn’t trigger a news story that lands in the top 10
results for that term in Google News, it will unfortunately
not appear as a Google Alert sent to your email inbox.
In addition to this problem, Google and the other
major search engines that crawl the open Web can
only actively monitor news coverage for sites they have
already indexed. If a company with a relatively new
website that has not yet been indexed by the major
search engines publishes an important story, it will not
be visible to their news alerts service.
Many business professionals who rely on Google Alerts
to push relevant news stories to them—about their own
company or one of their competitors—are surprised
to learn that they never saw a critical story simply
because it wasn’t in the top Google News results or
because it appeared on a site not indexed by Google.
This discovery has led many to regard Google Alerts as
unreliable as a tool for monitoring news coverage and
making business decisions.
As if that weren’t enough, there is an accelerating trend
in the media business that is creating what may be an
insurmountable obstacle for free news alert services.
Riseof“Paywalls”BlockingFreeSearch
Engines
According to “The State of the News Media 2013”
4
,
an annual report on American journalism by The Pew
Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, 450 daily
newspapers out of 1,380 in the U.S. now have—or plan
to adopt—“paywalls” for their content. This is a business
model by which a publisher requires readers to pay
a one-time fee or buy a full subscription in order to
access certain content that sits behind a wall on their
website.
Paywalls have proven to be a growth opportunity for
long-suffering newspapers, with leading publishers
such as The New York Times
®
, Gannett and Lee
Newspapers all reporting significant revenue increases
after incorporating a digital-only subscription into their
circulation options for customers. Other prominent
newspaper publishers to recently announce paywall
strategies include The Washington Post
®
, Tribune
Co., E.W. Scripps and McClatchy. In the last couple of
years, scores of magazine publishers and business-to-
business media companies have also implemented
paywalls for readers to access their content.
This is an excellent business trend for publishers, but an
ominous one for the major search engines. Without access
to the protected content, the search engines may only be
able to surface a headline or an excerpt of an article that
is sitting in front of the paywall, but can’t provide seamless
access to the full article. Some content sitting behind
a paywall is not accessible to search engines at all. If a
business professional is relying on one of those engines—
and their free news alerts service—to keep them informed
of relevant news stories, they may be left in the dark.
The trend is only accelerating, much to the detriment of
the major search engines. Three-fourths of publishers
now allow readers to view fewer than 10 articles per
month for free and the average number of free articles
dropped by 30 percent from 2012 to 2013
5
. As more
news content goes behind paywalls, the number of
articles properly indexed by Google and the other
search engines will continue to decline.
Here is the bottom line: publishers that have moved to
paywalls are finding business success, with the average
price of a monthly digital subscription increasing nearly
40 percent in the past year
6
. Now that publishers are
finding a profitable business model by placing content
behind paywalls, this trend is not likely to reverse.
Meanwhile, many countries are proposing new laws or
seeing the rise of new professional associations that
require search engines to pay licensing fees in order to
link to proprietary content. For example, a new law was
passed in Germany in 2013 that requires search engines
to pay a fee in order to license links and snippets
7
and 90
percent of Brazil’s publishers abandoned Google News
in 2012
8
when Google refused to compensate them
for the rights to their headlines. Moreover, a number of
Reproduction Rights Organizations (RROs) have sprung
up worldwide, with the mission of protecting and enabling
legal access to copyrighted material
9
. These RROs are
backed by media companies that offer search engines
the rights to search and access their content, but only in
exchange for a licensing fee.
Monitoring News Coverage: When it Comes to Online Tools, You Get What You Pay For
The combination of these political and business
developments points to the same result: a rapidly
growing amount of news content is effectively being
placed off-limits to the open Web. This represents a
major shortcoming of Google Alerts and other free
online news monitoring tools.
Conclusion:TheValueofaPaidNews
Aggregator
So, given the obvious shortcomings of Google Alerts and
other free search engine tools, what is a more effective
way for companies to monitor news content with online
tools? The answer is to invest in a paid service that
aggregates licensed news content to supplement what
is available on the open Web.
Paid news aggregators, such as LexisNexis
®
and Cision
®
,
have a number of important advantages over the major
search engines that crawl the open Web:
• Comprehensive—Paid services aggregate news
content from thousands of premium content
providers (e.g., LexisNexis licenses content from
26,000 publications), in addition to content from the
open Web that has been vetted by full-time editors
using their professional skills and judgment;
• Accurate—Paid aggregators provide sources and
articles licensed directly from respected publishers,
guaranteeing editorial integrity and source accuracy;
• Transparent—Paid services detail what sources are
available for both searches and news alerts, when that
content is available and where it can be found at its
original source;
• Maintained—News aggregator services will often
archive their content so that users don’t encounter
the frustration of a “dead link” on the open Web, and
typically provide value-added features such as text
normalization and tagging of documents for more
relevant search results;
• Supported—Providers such as LexisNexis announce
regular system upgrades and enhancements to users,
illustrating their ongoing investment in the quality
of the platform, and offer 24/7 customer support
representatives who are available to answer any
search questions;
• Consistent—Search engine companies such as
Google are still relatively young and exploring various
business models for monitoring news content, but
paid aggregators such as LexisNexis and Cision have
established track records in business (e.g., pricing,
delivery model, etc.) that go back several decades and
have been consistent.
It’s clear that relying on Google Alerts and other free
online monitoring tools is just not good enough anymore:
search engines are not indexing all of the news content
on the Web that is relevant; news content is rapidly
moving behind paywalls; publisher rights organizations are
forming to protect the economic value of that content
from open Web searches; and pending legislation further
threatens the open Web search engine model.
In life, you usually get what you pay for—and this is true
now more than ever when it comes to monitoring news
coverage online. For business professionals, the stakes
are too great to risk missing out on the whole story.
LexisNexis and the Knowledge Burst logo are registered trademarks of Reed Elsevier Properties Inc., used under license. Other products or services may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.
© 2013 LexisNexis. All rights reserved. NBI01278-0 0413
Formoreinformation…
onLexisNexisnewscontentandalerts,please
visitwww.lexisnexis.com/newswhitepaper.
1. www.seomoz.org/ugc/can-google-really-access-content-in-javascript-really
2. www.thefinancialbrand.com/28346/google-alerts-broken
3. http://support.google.com/news/publisher/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40391
4. http://stateofthemedia.org/2013/overview-5/overview-infographic/
5. http://www.newsandtech.com/dateline/article_ba88663e-85b8-11e2-b80f-0019bb2963f4.html
Thisdocumentisforeducationalpurposesonlyanddoesnotguaranteethefunctionalityorfeaturesof
LexisNexisproductsidentied.LexisNexisdoesnotwarrantthisdocumentiscompleteorerror-free.If
writtenbyathirdparty,theopinionsmaynotrepresenttheopinionsofLexisNexis.Basedoninformation
availableasofApril2013.
6. http://www.newsandtech.com/dateline/article_ba88663e-85b8-11e2-b80f-0019bb2963f4.html
7. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/02/technology/german-copyright-law-targets-google-links.html?_r=0
8. https://knightcenter.utexas.edu/blog/00-11803-brazilian-newspapers-leave-google-news-en-masse
9. http://www.ifrro.org
