Helpful Websites for Researching Media Coverage

Some companies spend tens of thousands of dollars annually to obtain CDs of TV media coverage and copies of newspaper clippings of every single story about them. This works well for many organizations, but if your budget does not permit this expense, consider one of these helpful resources for accessing coverage of your company or a competitor: 1. www.lexisnexis.com :where you can easily set up an account linked to a major credit card and use key words to find media coverage going back several years. It is especially good at finding coverage from newspapers, trade publications and transcripts from some TV interviews. Cost per clip retrieved is at this writing $2 each. 2. www.newslibrary.com : this is an index focused on thousands of weekly and daily newspapers across the U.S. Again, there is a nominal charge per entire story/clip found. 3. www.dogpile.com : sure it's a strange name for a website, but it is a good meta-search engine that combines the strengths of several search engines including MSN, Google, etc. It may find a story that you couldn't find anywhere else. 4. www.highbeam.com : This Chicago-based research outfit is currently providing free searches using keywords. You only pay if you print out the entire article. In my experience, this site has some of the oldest pieces retrievable online, and they have good tracking of wire service and PR wire stories, too. 5. www.google.com : Yes, this "old-reliable" search engine is a good one to use keywords to check under both "news" and "web" categories. Be sure to especially delve into the 5th to 15th or so pages returned under the "web" categories because you may find reference to media coverage that you didn't know existed. 6. Major daily newspapers: Check the websites of the major daily newspapers in the headquarters city where the company is based. Often, you can check their archives and retrieve stories going back several years for free or a nominal cost. To find websites or major newspapers (and other media) across the U.S., go to www.newslink.org 7. Trade Publications: If the company is in the foodservice business, check out the websites of the major foodservice publications (i.e., Restaurants & Institutions, Nation's Restaurant News), to see if they have covered the company. A good resource for finding Trade Publications is at: http://dir.yahoo.com/News_and_Media/Magazines/ then click on the Trade Magazines option and you can select magazines within several different fields. -- Thank you to Pirages Communications (www.piragescom.com) , a leading Chicago PR and Media Relations firm, for managing this Blog.