Social media provides a plethora of places to find out about media changes – are they all accurate?
There are more changes going on in the media than ever before and having accurate information on the media is crucial to media relations professionals. At Cision US, we have recently received quite a few queries from our clients asking how Cision is tracking all of the changes, layoffs and buyouts that are being announced every day. This is typically our response:
“Because of the growth of online media and a struggling economy, our industry is currently changing at a more rapid pace than ever before. One of the unfortunate side affects of these changes is the layoffs and buyouts affecting nearly every daily newspaper in the nation, as well as a number of magazines, broadcast outlets and news services. The research team at Cision knows how important this information is to you.
To stay on top of these changes and provide you with the most accurate information possible, we are tailoring our research to ensure that we are providing you with the tools you need to communicate effectively. Through developing relationships with key contacts at major outlets, increasing the frequency of research at outlets affected by layoffs, monitoring hundreds of industry sites and thousands of media sites, and a variety of other research methods, our research team continues to provide you with the latest changes. We always strive to offer you the most accurate media database in the industry.”
At Cision US, we have dozens upon dozens of researchers working to verify these changes. We also keep an eye out on changes that are reported elsewhere online. Social media has allowed a plethora of users to post changes to a variety of sites, from wikis to Twitter to group pages on social networks. And although Cision monitors many of these sites, we don’t change anything in our database without verifying it directly ourselves.
One of the up-and-comers in posting media changes is @themediaisdying on Twitter. The concept? Anyone can submit changes to an anonymous email address and the changes will then be posted on Twitter.
“So, Heidi,” you ask, “Can I trust the changes there?” I don’t have the answer. That is up to you to determine. What I can tell you, however, is that The Media Is Dying posts many of the original changes that Cision finds and posts on our Navigator site (in the order that we report them) as tweets on their page. See the screen shots below of both sites:
Changes from Cision's Navigator from the morning of 12-8-08
The same changes on themediaisdying, posted later the same day
Is this the big guy calling out the little guy for publishing the big guy’s changes without citing the big guy as the source? No, not really. One of the things that I love about social media is the ability of multiple sources to share information across communities.
No, the point of this post is to let media relations professionals know that Cision is watching, verifying and adding all of the changes in the media. Our research team strives each and every day to continue to provide you with the most accurate media information possible. We are not anonymous and are always eager to hear your feedback at changes.us at cision.com.
