Moreover Blog

Newsdesk Newsletters can now show the companies and people mentioned in the articles. This enhancement was released on Tuesday and is available to clients with access to Newsletters.

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By giving newsletter recipients more information at a glance, you increase the value of each article. Readers can get a better understanding of what they’re about to read. This can be invaluable for Newsletters containing many articles.

To enable Companies and/or People to Newsletters, open the Newsletter in Newsdesk and click “Edit Template.” Each can be enabled separately by ticking its box and clicking “Save.”

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We are planning to add this option to the main search results view in the future and welcome your feedback on this new feature.

When creating a new search, it is important first to understand what kind of data you are trying to find. Newsdesk provides many specialized ways of getting at data, but not all will be appropriate for every type of search. Not knowing what you want ahead of time can lead to unnecessary frustration with the process.

Tight Results

When getting noise (i.e., irrelevant results) in the search results just isn’t an option, you’ll want to use these strategies to create a tight search. This is useful when the search results are being fed directly into email communications or are integrated into an intranet or website. The top priority is relevance and “clean” results. It’s a trade off, however, as filtering the irrelevant results will block some good articles as well.

Getting tight results

The general philosophy of creating tight results is to be increasingly restrictive in adding search terms. This means using exact phrases, Boolean ANDs and multiple filters to winnow out anything that is not a guaranteed match.

Exact Phrases

Exact phrases are multiple words separated by spaces, contained within double quotation marks. For example, here is a simple search using 2 exact phrases:

“Moreover Technologies” AND “media monitoring”

Any news article or blog post that contains both of these phrases will almost certainly be about Moreover Technologies. Using “Moreover Technologies Inc.” would be even more precise, but we’d likely lose even more relevant results due to it being less common. This is an example of the trade off mentioned above.

Headline and START

Another way of ensuring that all search results are going to be relevant to your aim is for the keywords to appear at the beginning of an article. In Newsdesk, this is accomplished by using the Emphasis tab under the Advanced search options:

To specify that keywords must appear in the headline of an article, add them to the Headline Include field. To specify position in the article text, use the Position filter, which tells Newsdesk that the keywords in the main search box must appear within the first X number of words.

Additionally, you can use the START search parameter, detailed here.

Broad Searches

On the other side of the spectrum from Tight Searches are Broad Searches. These are most appropriate for internal communications, research, or in any case where the opportunity cost of missing a relevant result is greater than receiving a bad match.

Creating Broad Searches

The idea is to run a query that is specific enough to be relevant, but loose enough to catch all the articles you want.

Topics

In Newsdesk, a great place to start is the Topics filter. Grouped into broad channels of like topics, there are many pre-built categories available to you. If the topic has to do with agriculture, one useful topic may be “Agriculture News.” This can be used to create a broad search and keywords or other filters may be applied to narrow it down in a particular direction.

Grouping Keywords

The below search takes at least one word from each group. This way, it’s flexible, but also will contain at least 3 specific keywords. The aim of the following query is to find information about the price of agricultural commodities:

(corn wheat alfalfa barley) AND (commodit* ETF bale* bushel*) AND (price prices value)

There is no wrong way to create a search, but it saves time and frustration to think about which strategies may be best before beginning. Tight Searches and Broad Searches are at 2 ends of the spectrum. It’s likely that your searches will fall somewhere in the middle.

What other search strategies do you use?

Continuing our look at advanced searching in Newsdesk, this week we’ll examine the START operator.

START allows you to specify that keywords should appear in the first X number of words in any articles returned in your search results. Simple searches look for keywords that appear anywhere in an article. The drawback to this is that a passing mention at the end of an article will still match, but it’s less likely to be relevant to your search results.

Keywords used in the introductory paragraphs are likely to be the subject of the post. START gives you the option of distinguishing between items that are simple mentions and those that are the focus of an article.

Examples:

Here is a simple search, designed to find articles about Google (i.e., where Google is mentioned within the first 10 words of the article) and that mention smartphones anywhere in the article.

START/10:(Google) AND (smartphone OR “smart phone”)

We can do some simple Boolean logic with START as well. This query will find articles where Tumblr and Yahoo! are both mentioned in the first 10 words.

START/10:(Tumblr AND Yahoo)

This next search is looking for items about the major search engines.

START/10:(Google OR Bing OR Yahoo)

This search will return articles mentioning the search engines, but does not include Tumblr in the first 15 words. The idea here is that Tumblr should not be the focus of an article, though it may be mentioned.

START/15:(Google OR Bing OR Yahoo NOT Tumblr)

Emphasis Tab:

Another option for position-based keyword searching is to use the Position filter under the Emphasis tab in the Advanced search options:

Position doesn’t provide as much granularity as START, but it’s quick and easy, only requiring the tick of a radio button.

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Test it out and feel free to contact us if you have any questions.

Yesterday we unveiled a Newsdesk enhancement that is the culmination of months of planning, development efforts, and collaboration with clients: Article Tagging.

Uses include:

• Adding sentiment scores to articles and posts
• Applying your own editorial classification to content
• Setting up tag-based searches
• Organizing editorial workflows

Article Tagging allows you to add a layer of qualitative analysis to the data, giving professionals in your organization deeper insight into the articles they receive.

Manual or Automated

Tagging specific articles one at a time after manually reviewing them ensures that each one is relevant. You can also add tags to articles automatically by setting tags at the feed level. This can be used to complement a manual tagging effort, where a search result is sufficiently reliable that you always wish to add selected article tags to the articles going into that feed.

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Search Using Tags

You can drill into search results by combining keywords and article tags in the same search. Combine searches by using two searches for the same automated tags. Search an entire tag hierarchy, a specific tag, or in any combination.

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Clients that purchase the optional Article Tagging feature will have another tool for managing content in Newsdesk. Tagging articles manually or automatically based on search strings lets you create searches that can feed to your intranet, website, or Newsdesk emails.

Contact us to get started today.

To help you get up-to-the-minute information faster and easier using Newsdesk, we’ve put together a few quick tips for you:

Do you frequently make the same changes to your searches? If so, setting up a search template can save you time. Then, when you search, it’ll use your template already customized to your search preferences.  Here’s how:

1. From the “My Content” drop-down menu, select “Edit search template”
2. Add keywords, set media types, languages, etc. to customize the template for the types of searches you usually perform
3. Click “Save”

Want to add your own articles to your search? You can manually insert articles and company information such as a link to PDFs and announcements to send out to your website or intranet using an RSS feed via the Export tab or in a Newsletter from the Email tab.  It’s easy:

1. Open the drop-down menu for the search you would like to add an article to
2. Click “Add Article”
3. Enter the headline, body, source name, etc.
4. Refresh your search and see your newly added article. It will automatically appear in any alerts or exported feeds containing that search.

Need to do further analysis? You can download data into Excel from Newsdesk. Here’s how:

1. Open the drop-down menu for the search you would like to download the information from
2. Click “Analyze Feed”
3. Click “View Analysis”
4. From the “Download” drop-down menu, select “Feed Statistics” or “Article Data”

 

A topic that has been growing in popularity is “crypto-currencies” with the most common of these being Bitcoin. Bitcoins are a digital currency that are bought on an exchange and then used to anonymously buy and sell goods online. If you haven’t heard of them, check out this video.

Bitcoin’s pricing has proven to be very volatile. For example, on April 10th the exchange rate of one Bitcoin dropped from $230 to $165. With a 28% plunge in just one day, wouldn’t it be useful to see if there are any indicators of whether Bitcoin will rise or fall over the next days? To get some insight, we pulled data from our media monitoring product, Newsdesk, into Excel and matched it up against historical data for Bitcoin’s exchange rates.

Unlike gold or a publically traded stock, Bitcoin’s pricing is not tied to any physical assets so it is vulnerable to fluctuations not normally seen in stocks.

Digging deeper with Newsdesk, we wanted to see how much the media’s hype about Bitcoins seemed to impact its price. As the graph below shows, trading volume seemed to lag after media mentions. This makes sense since a lot of the people using Bitcoins aren’t necessarily professional traders, so there is a disconnect between the information available and the market’s pricing; often a full day lag from media mentions to a spike in volume.

As shown here, simply using media mentions to determine the increase or decrease in Bitcoin’s exchange rate is an imperfect model.

As we move forward in an increasingly digital world, it will be interesting to see what role Bitcoins continue to play; whether they will be considered an investment or simply someplace to flee when traditional currencies have problems. Until then, if you’re a Newsdesk user and want to follow Bitcoins, or to delve deeper into your company’s online mentions, here is a simple way to download an analytics feed:

1. Click the Search Tab
2. Click New Search
   1. Select News only
   2. Search term: bitcoin*(* is a wildcard that searches for bitcoin, bitcoins, etc)
   3. Default search settings: English only, 60 days, all languages
   4. Save
   5. Click Analytics Tab
      1. Line graph, 60 Days by Day
      2. Drag Bitcoin feed over, Click “View Analytics”
      3. Download -> Feed Statistics (Excel)

For the examples in this post, we copied the Bitcoin trading data from here and put it together with the exported Newsdesk coverage in Excel. Excel allows us to easily dig through both sets of data to identify any hidden trends we wouldn’t see otherwise.

Can you think of any topics you’d like us to mine for in Newsdesk?

Recently, we brought the NewsRight brand into the Moreover Technologies fold, reinforcing our commitment to providing seamless access to the high quality content our customers rely on.

Moreover Technologies has been closely aligned with NewsRight to meet the demand for trusted content from news publishers. With NewsRight joining the Moreover family and in conjunction with partner BurrellesLuce, there is now a single, consolidated go-to source of licensed content available.

Moving forward with one catalog will make online content licensing, tracking and distribution far easier for our clients. We are pleased by the vote of confidence from the 29 publishers/owners in the NewsRight catalog.

Our value and service grows with these changes:

• The NewsRight name and logo will be rolled into Moreover Technologies

• The Moreover / BurrellesLuce Metabase Premium service, featuring full access to premium licensed content, will be renamed NewsRight

We look forward to continuing to serve our clients in the years to come with a focus on compliance with publishers. Please contact Client Services if you have any questions.

What is it?

Moreover recently introduced a new search operator that functions similar to proximity searches (“keyword1 keyword2″~5). You can specify 2 groups of keywords that must appear near each other. You can also set how many words apart they should be.

Example:

(CAT caterpillar) NEAR/10 (tractor construction)

This looks for the words “CAT” or “caterpillar” within 10 words of “tractor” or “construction.”

Why use it?

NEAR is another tool in a user’s toolbox for creating a focused and relevant search. If the combo of Boolean logic and Newsdesk’s filters aren’t providing enough granular control over search results, NEAR may be the answer.

NEAR fills the gap between exact phrases, which may be too strict, and simply using the AND operator, which may be too broad. It allows more flexibility.

Example:

(gold silver copper palladium platinum) NEAR/5 (ETF* “exchange traded fund” stock*)

Using NEAR here saves you the time of writing out “gold ETF,” “silver ETF,” and so on. It also catches cases where an article phrases them in a different order, e.g. “ETFs for gold and silver.”

Nested search:

The NEAR operator can be used within a longer search. Here I’m looking for stories mentioning Les Wexner in conjunction with specific electric car companies.

(“Les Wexner” “Leslie Wexner” “limited brands”) AND ((fisker coda) AND ((car* vehicle*) NEAR/10 (electric green “plug-in” plugin))) NOT (“wexner center” osu “ohio state”)

Go try it out in your own Newsdesk account.

Knowing the lay of the land — inside and out — is key to winning. Top runners walk their course ahead of time. Battle commanders reconnoiter the countryside. Sports teams scout their opponents.

Business is no different.

Customers need to be scoped out and understood. A great thing about living in 2013 is that, while some may hide, people are expressing themselves publicly on social media. Talking with them is easier than ever before.

With ease of monitoring and engagement increasing, one might think that everyone is doing it. Infosys has put together an infographic of how businesses are monitoring social media that shows this isn’t the case.

It’s surprising how few people have started. If you haven’t, there’s good news. You’re not too late. Only 24% of companies are actively tracking social media efforts. You could get a leg up on the competition through monitoring the spaces your customers inhabit.

Don’t delay too long, though, because 60% are looking to increase their social media monitoring by 2014.

What do you think about these numbers? Let us know in the comments.

It’s been an interesting year for paywalls on news sites. Many sites are trying them out, some are taking them down, and others are tweaking them.

We’ve talked previously about various paywall strategies and how recent court rulings have affected media monitoring companies. It’s not clear how things will shake out, but the online news landscape is undeniably changing.

Today we’ll walk through some notable examples.

Variety’s Paywall Comes Down

Today the entertainment publication relaunched itself as a glossy weekly magazine, also called Variety, to accompany its newly free, un-paywalled website. There, in addition to covering film and television and major Hollywood studios, it has added a new focus: streaming content.“There’s a lot of trial and error going on here,” says Cynthia Littleton, one of the publication’s three editors-in-chief.

San Fran Chronicle Launches Paywall

As more newspapers are scrambling for profits in the face of sagging print advertising revenue, many are looking to make up for the decline — and the Chronicle is no exception. The newspaper is looking to drum up more cash by offering in-depth articles and columns for a monthly fee on a site that’s separate from SFGate.com, which will remain free. According to a post on Saturday announcing SFChronicle.com:

Subscribers to the new website will find the newspaper’s unrivaled content with brilliant photos, an uncluttered format and the familiar design of the Chronicle. Premium stories and columns will update and change with the news throughout the day.

In some ways, the move appears to be a bid to woo more readers back to good old-fashioned print. The lowest-priced subscription for all-digital content costs $12 per month — but readers can sign up to get the same online content, plus the Sunday edition of the newspaper delivered to their homes, for the exact same price. Digital access to SFChronicle.com plus Friday-Sunday delivery costs $3.60 per week, while access to the site in addition to Monday-Sunday delivery will set you back $5 per week

Sun and Telegraph Cause “Wholesale Rethink” from Publishers

The Telegraph has publicized the website meter to readers via the newspaper and online and has contacted advertisers and agencies via email. The email states the paywall will help advertisers “develop a closer rapport with readers” and make campaign budgets “work harder and smarter” through the launch of new ad packages based on actual demographic data given by subscribers at registration…

The Sun has not revealed exact plans for its forthcoming pay model to be introduced later this year. A spokesman says it will offers readers “a bigger and better experience”.

Douglas McCabe, media analyst at Enders Analysis, says the two announcements mark “important milestones” and will require a “wholesale rethink” from publishers on how they position their online advertising offerings.

OC Register Implements 7 Day Trials

[R]eaders who want to browse the newspaper online must buy a subscription or pay a daily rate to have access to the website. Non-subscribers can try the online Register for free for seven days. A limited amount of content such as weather, traffic, movie listings, the calendar of events and headlines of local news stories will remain free.

Washington Post’s Paywall to Go Live This Summer

This summer, The Washington Post will start charging frequent users of its Web site [sic], asking those who look at more than 20 articles or multimedia features a month to pay a fee, although the company has not decided how much it will charge.

The paper said, however, that it will exempt large parts of its audience from having to pay the fees. Its home-delivery subscribers will have free access to all of The Post’s digital products, and students, teachers, school administrators, government employees and military personnel will have unlimited access to the Web site while in their schools and workplaces.

Which strategy will prove to be a winner with these major papers?

• Keep it free like Variety?
• Have a free and paid site like SFGate.com and SFChronicle.com?
• Use metered paywalls and free trials?

Share your thoughts in the comments.

We’ve been hard at work improving Newsdesk to bring our clients more of what they need. Here’s a rundown of what’s new in the April 11th update.

Table of Contents Options in Newsletter Templates

You now have a new way to customize your newsletters templates more fully. The Table of Contents is automatically generated and included at the top of email Newsletters.

You may choose from:

• Table of contents (default)

• No table of contents (new)

• Table of Contents with article headlines (new)

Clean Layout

To make it easier to scan through the search results, the headline now appears below the source, author, and publish time.

The Twitter and Yammer icons have been updated and extraneous lines have been replaced by whitespace.

Rich Atom

For our “Rich Atom” feed format, we will now include a link to an XSD file that you can use to validate the returned XML. This brings us in line with industry standards.

If calls are made too frequently, a 429 “Too many requests” error will be returned. Calls for content should be spaced at least 60 seconds apart.

Enhancements to the “Add Articles” Feature

Articles that you manually add yourself can be translated directly from saved searches and Newsletters using Google Translate.

The language is set after clicking “Add Article” from a saved search’s drop-down menu.

Other Enhancements

• To help manage large source lists, in the Advanced Sources tab, we have made the selection area larger and added sources are sorted alphabetically.

• Further improvements to duplicate detection for similar articles.

• Wildcards now work with case sensitive searching and Power Searches.

Log in to Newsdesk to see them for yourself and tell us what you think.

Last week, a US Federal Court ruled in favor of the Associated Press in their lawsuit against media monitoring company Meltwater. We have written previously about BurrellesLuce filing an amicus brief and reactions around the web.

At stake is the definition of “Fair Use” as it relates to content published online. It has ramifications for the business models and legal strategies of publishers, as well as media monitoring companies and their clients.

Jeff John Roberts at BusinessWeek summarizes how the court arrived at its judgment (links in the original):

To decide if something is fair use, courts apply a four-part test that turns in large part on whether the defendant is using the copyrighted work for something new or unrelated to its original purpose. Famous examples of fair use include a parody rap song of “Pretty Woman” and Google’s display of thumb-size pictures in its image search. In the AP case, however, Meltwater’s fair use defense failed.

Judge Cote rejected the fair use claim in large part because she didn’t buy Meltwater’s claim that it’s a “search engine” that makes transformative use of the AP’s content. Instead, Cote concluded that Meltwater is more like a business rival to the AP: “Instead of driving subscribers to third-party websites, Meltwater News acts as a substitute for news sites operated or licensed by AP.”

Cote’s rejection of Meltwater’s search engine argument was based in part on the “click-through” rate of its stories. Whereas Google News users clicked through to 56 percent of excerpted stories, the equivalent rate for Meltwater was 0.08 percent, according to figures cited in the judgment. Cote’s point was that Meltwater’s service doesn’t provide people with a means to discover the AP’s stories (like a search engine)—but instead is a way to replace them.

The judgment also points to the amount of content that Meltwater replicated. Whereas fair use allows anyone to reproduce a headline and snippets, Cote suggested Meltwater took “the heart” of the copyrighted work by also reproducing the “lede” and other sentences:

“A lede is a sentence that takes significant journalistic skill to craft. [It shows] the creativity and therefore protected expression involved with writing a lede and the skill required to tweak a reader’s interest.”

How the ruling affects publishers

Publishers and media monitoring companies haven’t always worked together and this is going to change. Newspapers are needing additional revenue streams and the clients of media monitoring outfits have been a neglected source of money.

Publishers are going to have to work together to exploit this income source. To an end user tracking mentions of their company or attempting to do competitive analysis, it is quite a lot of effort to piece together a total national or international catalog of licensed sources. Media monitoring companies are the natural connection between publishers and end users.

This court decision gives content publishers a strong position in this partnership. Companies that try to get around their wishes have this legal precedent working against them.

You’re a Media Monitoring Company (MMC), now what?

As I alluded to above, the key to survival is acquiring licenses to monitor and distribute content from publishers. This will protect you from legal actions like the Associated Press took against Meltwater.

Groups like NewsRight and companies such as BurrellesLuce in cooperation with Moreover Technologies have developed one solution, Metabase Premium. Before the dust settles, others will likely emerge, as well.

Whatever you do, complying with the publishers’ wishes is key. Some are satisfied with the value of MMC’s driving traffic to their sites. Others, like in the Meltwater case, see it as an infringement. Protect yourself and your clients.

You’re a client of a Media Monitoring Company, are you protected?

While this lawsuit has defined some parameters of Fair Use, what’s less clear is what happens if you are distributing content without permission from the publisher. Ask the company that you’re using if they have licenses for the content that they are distributing to you. Make sure that you are protected from lawsuits yourself.

What does the future hold?

I’ll leave you with the words of Corynne McSherry, director of intellectual property at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which opposes the ruling:

“What we’re going to see now is a lot of litigation over what is a legitimate search engine or not,” said McSherry, whose organization filed an amicus brief backing Meltwater. “I think this opinion muddies the water.”

Our team has been working on our latest round of improvements to Newsdesk and here is what’s new this week.

Save directly to Shared Content

When collaborating and sharing saved searches with your company or department, you can save them directly to group of your choice. Previously, you’d have to save a copy to your own account and then share it. Now, that extra step has been eliminated to prevent any confusion stemming from multiple copies.

Newsletter styling fix

We fixed a bug where some users would see an incorrect font size in the header and footer text of Newsletters.

Coming Soon:

We’ll have more information on an all-new set of features allowing users to create, edit, and mark content with custom tagging. Be on the lookout here for details as they become available..

Last time, we talked about major newspapers backing the Associated Press against media monitoring company Meltwater. Today, let’s look at some of the responses from around the web:

ArsTechnica has a balanced summary of the dispute:

Last week, the nation’s largest newspapers lined up to tell the New York federal judge considering the case that they support the AP. An amicus brief [PDF] was filed by The New York Times, The McClatchy Company, Advance Publications, and the Newspaper Association of America, which represents 200 newspapers around the country. In the brief, they argue that Meltwater isn’t a search engine—it’s a competitor.

The Brief discusses the suit’s implications:

The outcome of the lawsuit will depend on how convincing Meltwater’s search engine argument is. They use the same pieces of information—a headline, link, and short snippet—and are generally agreed to be covered by fair use provisions, but the legal precedents against them are racking up. And if the AP manages to get a favorable ruling over Meltwater, other search engines could find themselves being asked for licensing fees too.

Meltwater responds to the filing of the amicus brief:

Plaintiff’s claims are barred in whole or in part by the doctrine of copyright misuse. Through this Complaint and through other means, Plaintiff seeks to misuse its limited copyright monopoly to extend its control over the Internet search market more generally, thereby improperly expanding the protections afforded by U.S. copyright law. Among other things, AP has misused its copyright monopoly by demanding that third parties take licenses for search results, which do not require a license under U.S. copyright law, and AP has also formed a consortium (called NewsRight) with the purpose of further misusing its copyright monopoly to extract licensing fees that exceed what the law allows.

BurrellesLuce weighs in with their perspective:

[W]e curate content on behalf of our clients and charge a royalty. Those royalties go back to the publishers. PR professionals are understanding, more and more, why these measures are necessary. They recognize the difference between a genuine media monitoring service and an aggregator. They realize they may be exposing their organization, as well as their clients, to substantial copyright liability by using the latter.

Of course, this ruling will affect more than PR professionals. Anyone that analyzes the news and other media to understand their competitive landscape has an interest in this court case.

How do you think this will play out?