Universal Information Services

Todd Murphy, CEO

Much has already been written about the importance of Artificial Intelligence (AI), but in this post I wanted to outline why Universal Information Services has developed our Alpha Clips media monitoring services using Artificial Intelligence. The media intelligence industry is comprised of several important functions necessary to corporations, government agencies, and non-profit organizations. News monitoring, media measurement, and media contact management are the three pillars organizations rely on to measure their communications’ effectiveness. Whether for strategic public relations, crisis management, competitive intelligence, or smarter business intelligence, the media intelligence industry serves many masters.

So why has Universal Information Services decided to be the first news monitoring company in the world to harness Artificial Intelligence to serve these masters? Quite frankly, so we can focus the intellectual heavy lifting on our trained staff, letting the computer AI improve the more routine decisions that once consumed valuable employee time. In other words, by developing an AI system to make smart decisions about selecting media mentions, summarizing stories, and clustering similar topics, our trained team members can focus 100% of their time improving your results and delivering much deeper insights. Better media intelligence comes from more intelligent services. In the fall of 2016, I decided that development resources were now available to the extent we could create a “smarter” news monitoring service, so we did.

Why (AI) for News Monitoring?

By understanding and training our news monitoring programs to follow the conventions of journalism, writing style, and topical similarities, we are able to generate a level of media monitoring never before possible in a timely manner.  Alpha Clips applies artificial intelligence to analyze and summarize newspaper, magazine, and online media coverage so found news can be more quickly read by the user. Additionally, key stories that include related articles across other media outlets will be shown as clusters, with secondary articles linked under the Alpha Clip. Clustering secondary articles helps show the reach of a story identified in the Alpha Clip, and save time in consuming news, features important for public relations and crisis management.

The Alpha Clip platform uses the conventions and formatting of journalism to shorten the length of a news story by intelligently summarizing an article. Summarized Alpha Clips are enriched with click through access to the original, full-text content and images from the publisher. More specifically, our artificial intelligence trains the system to extract key elements of a story based on your specific needs.  For instance, the system understands your targeted interests and weighs that understanding against the importance of a headline, lead paragraph, and subsequent sentences; creating a totally new and different way of understanding your news.

What Makes Alpha Clips So Different?

With Alpha Clips, public relations and communication professionals in all industries can realize many improvements.

• Faster access to breaking news across email, desktop, and mobile app environments
• Streamlined reading that intelligently reduces article length by up to 75%, allowing the reader to consume the content much faster
• Clustered articles that are closely related to the Alpha Clip, showing the reach of a story and saving time
• Click through access to see full-text stories and images as published at the origin
• Immediate sharing within your organizational family, according to licensing or permitted usage
• Newsletter creation and “pinning” of key stories for prioritizing your most important news
• Where necessary, licensed content so the subscriber is copyright compliant*

So How Does AI Improve Media Intelligence?

Alpha Clips is a platform designed to streamline news monitoring and to allow communication professionals to quickly consume key information, using that data to adjust desired outcomes. In the past 100 years we’ve learned that the organizations that can be faster, more efficient, and better informed will be more successful than organizations not achieving similar attributes. Our goal with Alpha Clips is to provide access to far better media intelligence, helping more organizations improve their position through efficient communication. We call this… Intelligent News. From the Beginning.