Taking the Pulse of the Media

"This software allows us to... digest massive quantities of news content faster, and with a consistency that has previously been unavailable," says Mark Weiner, vice president of the research unit of Medialink, which introduced its news-processing service InfoTrend. InfoTrend pores over news coverage, looking for pre-programmed keywords, such as product brand names and adjectives like "polluting" or "comfortable."Next, the software analyzes the gist of the story, tallying up the positive and negative perceptions. It converts the results into a report on the success or failure of a given corporate campaign. "A bank asked us to track the emergence of privacy issues over last five years --privacy at home, banking privacy, privacy over the Net," Weiner says. The key takeaway for the PR industry: more efficient monitoring of, and reaction to, press reports, according to Weiner. "Knowing what was reported is one thing. But knowing why and what you can do about it is value-add." It is the very suggestion that PR can influence press coverage that concerns some industry critics. What is good for PR is bad for journalism, including technological efficiency. K. Lasn edits Adbusters magazine, which organizes "culture-jamming" efforts in the name of environmental and other causes. He says he is frequently in a war of messages in which the corporate PR machine has a potent advantage.