Universal Information Services

Today, the Denver Post, along with 75 other MediaNews Group daily publications, will begin requiring some form of payment to see the publisher’s online content. Known as a paywall, this form of digital subscription comes with mixed reviews. Bottom line, even the news industry must think about its bottom line.

A paywall can work in a variety of ways. Some news sites may require a subscription to view any content while others, such as the New York Times, may allow a non-subscriber 10 free story views a month. The Los Angeles Times has a 15-article a month limit. Last year, the Chicago Tribune launched a $14.99 per month paywall for some of its content.

A subscription paywall does more than block the casual web user from viewing material. It also blocks search engines and web crawlers. Many monitoring services use only a souped-up Google News type of search, scanning the Internet for online publications only, and call that print monitoring (tracking your impact in newspapers and magazines). It’s not. The problems with the “google news” approach include providing irrelevant articles and simply not being able to find paywall-protected stories. Here’s a fact to know if you are interested in tracking your media footprint – using Google searches alone can prevent you from finding 70 percent of today’s online content. Web monitoring just isn’t going to cut it anymore if you are measuring your public relations impact.

So what does this mean for Universal Information Services’ clients?

Luckily, Universal is a complete news monitoring service, and we are proud of our managed press clipping efforts. This means we have readers, yes – human readers – monitoring virtually every daily and weekly print publication across the nation and evaluating whether or not an article is relevant to your organization. Monitoring print will ensure you see the article as it appeared in a newspaper along with accurate circulation metrics. Many of our clients keep their bases covered by subscribing to both our web and print monitoring services. Then there are no worries of missing any coverage, whether it is an article in a daily newspaper or on an online publication or blog.

Universal buys our publications, licenses the content from the publishers, and pays royalties to the publishers we track online behind their paywall. This “white-hat” approach ensures what we deliver is compliant so you can do your job evaluating the effectiveness of your media outreach. We believe a strong media benefits our PR clients, and ensuring journalism survives monetarily is important.

We’re here to make sure your news monitoring needs are covered, even with the rising trend of online paywalls. Universal Information is always evolving and changing to meet the needs of our clients. Same rules, new tools.