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Why care about your news coverage? Because news consumers are your customers. Because the favourability of news coverage is a proven leading indicator of corporate reputation. And your reputation among consumers impacts their purchasing decisions.

Line chart showing an inverse relationship between audience and media favourability based on actual data from a real client.In dealing with news coverage of your organization, more is not always better. In fact, more is often much, much worse. Major news outlets are more likely to cover negative stories than positive, and they are often much more likely to devote more prominent placement to the more negative or more scandalous stories. Let’s face it, we’ve all heard the line: “if it bleeds, it leads.”

Of course, sometimes more news coverage is better – and positive media attention can be crucial when you are trying to promote a new product or service and you need to get in front of consumers in order to build awareness. There are also times, however, when established companies and brands may need to reduce or redirect news coverage. In almost all instances, companies and organizations, whether new or longstanding, can benefit from proper awareness of the treatment they receive at the hands of the news media.

So measuring your news coverage needs to be more than a quick chart telling you whether your news volume is up or down and what region most of your coverage appeared in. Or the supposed advertising value of all that coverage. Should you count every news story you see like it was saving you money on advertising? Of course not. Maybe sometimes, but certainly not always.

You need more than just charts and numbers, and you certainly need more than just an assessment of how often the media is reporting on your company.

You need a real evaluation of the favourability of your coverage and you need a real evaluation of the issues affecting your media profile. You need the expertise to know when increasing media volume can help improve your public profile, and when lowering media volume can help protect your public reputation.

And just as importantly, you need all this on a timely basis. During critical periods, you may need expert analysis on a daily basis to help you deal with issues as they arise. Not a review of what happened that comes a month from now. If you need background material for an important meeting that’s coming up, you need it before the meeting – not a week afterwards.

For more information, contact Acuitas Media Research at Info@AcuitasMedia.com or 416-596-0778.