News monitoring
News monitoring: track your brand in online news
Coverage in an online news article carries weight that a social post does not. Babel42 checks a large index of online news sites for your search on a schedule, and puts the articles next to your social mentions.
Each article is scored for sentiment and sized by the estimated audience of the outlet that ran it. A mention in a big outlet stands out from a mention on a small blog.
Included on the free plan · no card required · 500 mentions a month free
How news monitoring works
| Plans | Every plan, including Free. |
|---|---|
| What is covered | Articles published on online news sites. Not TV, radio, print editions or podcasts. |
| How fresh | On your plan's schedule: every 12 hours on Free, 4 hours on Starter, 2 hours on Growth, every hour on Scale and every 30 minutes on Enterprise. A busy search is checked more often than a quiet one, within those limits. |
| History | News starts from recent articles, about the last two days. Your archive then builds from the day the monitor starts. |
| Reach | Each article carries an estimate of its outlet's audience, so big coverage is easy to spot. |
| Sentiment | AI scores every mention we collect as positive, neutral or negative, with a confidence figure. Included on every plan. |
Media monitoring, the online part
Media monitoring used to mean a press-cuttings service: someone read the papers and posted you the clippings. Today most coverage that matters is published online first, and that is the part Babel42 watches.
If you need TV and radio transcripts or print clippings, you need a broadcast monitoring service as well. For a brand that wants to know which websites wrote about it this week, and whether the coverage was kind, online news monitoring covers it.
Keep news searches short and exact
News searches have a length limit, so a news monitor works best with a short, exact search. Use quotes for your brand name and a few NOT terms for the obvious lookalikes:
"Acme Pay" NOT ("Acme Corporation" OR cartoon)What to do with the articles you find
News coverage is usually the start of a conversation, not the end of it.
See the knock-on effect
An article often sets off a wave of social posts. Put news and social on the same chart and you can see it happen.
Find the journalists
The writers who cover your category show up again and again. Save them to an outreach list.
Track a rival's press
Run the same search for a competitor to see who covers them and how often.
Report on PR
Coverage by week, with sentiment and outlet audience, is a PR report you do not have to build by hand.
What news monitoring cannot see
Broadcast and print. Only articles published on news websites.
Old coverage. A new monitor starts with about two days of articles, so start it before a launch, not after.
Individual outlets. You search by keyword across all the news sites in the index, rather than following one publication.
A monitor's dashboard, from a demo project: news and social mentions on one chart.
News and social, in one place
News is one source in Babel42's social listening tool. One monitor can watch it alongside the other networks you pick, and the results land in the same dashboard, with the same sentiment scoring and alerts. New to the idea? Start with what social listening is.
News monitoring, answered
Is news monitoring included on the free plan?
Yes. News is one of the five networks on the free plan, alongside Bluesky, YouTube, Hacker News and DEV.to.
Is this a full media monitoring service?
It covers online news, which is where most coverage now appears first. It does not cover TV, radio or print editions, so for those you would need a broadcast monitoring service as well.
How far back does news monitoring go?
A new monitor starts with recent articles, about the last two days. From then on every article it finds is kept for your plan's history period: 90 days on Free, up to unlimited on Enterprise.
Can I follow a specific publication?
Not as a channel. News is searched by keyword across all the sites in the index. Put the outlet's name in your search if you want its articles that mention you.
How is the reach of an article measured?
Each article is tagged with an estimate of its outlet's audience. It tells you how big the publication is, not how many people read that one article.
Other networks we cover
- Bluesky search and monitoring live from the firehose, on the free plan.
- X (Twitter) monitoring through the official API, as a paid add-on.
- YouTube monitoring for the videos that name your brand, on the free plan.
- Instagram hashtag monitoring a sampled view of the tags around your brand, on paid plans.
- Review monitoring for Trustpilot and Google reviews, with sentiment, on paid plans.