Universal Information Services

What is a Daily News Brief?

Daily News Briefs are curated, customizable reports that only show you the most important news of the day. They are designed to show your business or organization what you need to know – quickly – so you can move on with your day. Think of your brief as a personal front page of breaking news, customized just for your company or institution. When you’re rushing out the door in the morning, you’re not going to turn to page B6 to get your quick-hits news of the day, or scroll through a complete media monitoring report. To find out what people will be talking about at the water cooler (is that still a thing people do?), you’re going to look at the day’s biggest stories on A1.

This service is different from traditional media monitoring. If the Daily News Brief is the front page of your newspaper, then comprehensive monitoring would be your complete newspaper. While there’s certainly value in seeing all your relevant media coverage, that can be time consuming to digest. And time is one thing nobody has enough of.

Say, for example, your company is the subject of a major news event. Three local newspapers cover the story, and versions of the story run both in print and online. Four local TV stations also cover the event, and those stories are broadcast during several time slots and are also posted online. When you look at your company’s comprehensive monitoring report, it would be lengthy with separate story hits for each time the story ran online, in print or aired on TV. It’s great to see that your company drew such a volume of earned media coverage, but as that one woman in that one viral video said: Ain’t nobody got time for that.

This is where a Daily News Brief would come in handy. Universal’s trained editors can recognize the repetition in story topics and would deliver to you just the most important one or two stories. Instead of having to wade through 14 stories, you are presented with only the most important ones.

Customizing Your Daily News Brief

So, how do we know what stories to select or what clips are important to you? It’s all about the onboarding process – you tell us what you want to see. The Daily News Brief is meant to serve you and your team, so you should be a key part in deciding how the content will be curated. Maybe you only want stories in which your company is the focus, and you couldn’t care less about story hits that have a one-off mention. Maybe you only want stories from smaller, more unique sources. We can work with you to tailor this report to exactly what you want to see.

Once you’ve signed on for this service, think of our editors as a part of your team – the line of communication will always be open. As your team and your needs evolve, we can adjust your strategy to accommodate.

The Daily News Brief will be customizable – yes, in content, but also in appearance and frequency. Your company doesn’t fit a mold, so why should your report? Branding, colors, unique story sections – this report can (and should!) be entirely your own.

How Others Use the Daily News Brief

Let’s take a look at how a few of Universal’s clients have customized their reports:

• One regional nonprofit asked to cross out the “Daily” part of Daily News Brief, and instead make it a monthly roundup of all the positive work the organization is doing.
• While most of our Daily News Briefs are delivered in the morning to kick off the day, one drug company wanted its report delivered at the end of the day as a way to wrap up and see how they performed.
• Some clients request that the report be delivered to one person on their team, who then reviews and distributes the Daily News Brief to their members. Another client prefers to be totally hands-off and has Universal’s editors directly send the news brief to its stakeholders.

This is your Daily News Brief – it should be set up to serve your interests.

Are you interested in learning more about our curated, customizable Daily News Briefs, meant to save you time – your very own newspaper front page? Read more here, and feel free to contact us here.