15 Affordable News Monitoring Tools to Keep You in the Know

11 min read

News monitoring tools are becoming more and more popular as the volume of online information produced daily grows. It’s hard to keep up. As we all struggle with information overload on a daily basis, it’s harder to filter and access valuable information. News monitoring tools can save your time and help track topics of your interest with surgical precision and timing. They’re great for PR, research, or brand reputation monitoring.

A feature image for a post about news monitoring tools

News monitoring tools track keywords connected to the topics that matter for you and aggregate all online content that mentions your keywords. They find these pieces of content in real time.

When it comes to sources news monitoring tools scan, they usually include:

  • Websites
  • News sites
  • Blogs
  • Discussion forums
  • Review sites
  • Social networks

Some news monitoring services offer clipping service. The tools look for mentions across traditional news coverage, such as radio stations, television, and newspapers.

We gathered media monitoring services with the highest coverage on the market, so everyone can find a solution that fit their needs.

Here are the 15 best news monitoring tools:

  1. Brand24
  2. Brandwatch
  3. Hootsuite
  4. Sprout Social
  5. Cision Communications Cloud
  6. Meltwater
  7. SentiOne
  8. TVEyes
  9. Critical Mention
  10. Mention
  11. Agility PR Solutions
  12. Dataminr
  13. Google Trends
  14. Prowly
  15. NewsDashboard

Brand24

Brand24 is one of the leading media monitoring services for PR pros out there.

Easy to use, used by companies of all sizes, it’s been battle tested both by large brands like IKEA and small companies alike. The sources Brand24 monitors include:

  • Online news sources
  • Social media platforms
  • Review sites
  • Blogs
  • Video platforms
  • Podcasts
  • Discussion forums
  • Newsletters
  • Other publicly available sources

Start news monitoring for free!

Apart from online and social media monitoring in real time, Brand24 offers a handful of data and analytics about collected mentions:

Importantly, Brand24 has a few convenient ways to keep you notified about the topics you monitor:

  • Daily and weekly reports on email
  • Storm Alerts on email are sent when sudden changes in metrics happen
  • Slack notifications arrive directly to one of your Slack channels
  • Push notifications from mobile app

Once you set them up, there’s no need to use the media monitoring tool as all mentions come to you.

When it comes to affordable news monitoring services, Brand24 offers a wide media coverage and robust analytics for a reasonable price.

Price: Free trial available, plans start at $79 / month.

Brand24 - News Monitoring Tool
Brand24 – News Monitoring Tool

Keep track of the most important news!

Brandwatch

Brandwatch is probably the biggest news tracking tool here. It’s a huge social media monitoring tool companies use to analyze the online presence of their brand.

Among many features, Brandwatch offers typical news monitoring:

Apart from reputation management, Brandwatch is also a good choice if you’re interested in consumer insights. The tool has a unique AI platform that digs deep into insights collected in mentions.

Brandwatch is one of the most advanced solutions presented here, but also probably the most expensive one at the same time. Prices are available on demand, and if your marketing budget doesn’t allow spending a few hundred dollars on news monitoring tools, then it might not be for you. Instead, you might try Brandwatch alternatives.

Prices: Contact sales.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is one of the most popular social media management tool that also offers a media monitoring service.

It’s not just a social media scheduling tool, but there’s much more to it. Hootsuite is great for monitoring various news sources, monitor your online activity, analyze results, and manage ads. One of their recent additions include OwlyWriter – an AI-powered tool for writing social media posts.

It’s a powerful tool with lots of features ranging from social media scheduling, social media analytics to news monitoring, and more. Another cool thing about it is that you can integrate it with many other tools.

Price: Professional plan starts at $99 / month.

Start news monitoring for free!

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is one of these news tracking tools that is a good fit for small businesses, agencies, and enterprises alike. The tool is mostly a social media management tool, but some features make it great for online news monitoring as well.

Sprout Social’s social listening platform is rich in features that go beyond news monitoring and into in-depth analytics:

  • Audience analysis
  • Customer feedback
  • Consumer research
  • Influencer recognition
  • Sentiment research
  • Campaign analytics
  • Competitor comparison
  • Trend identification

Price: Starts at $249 per month.

Cision Communications Cloud

Cision Communications Cloud is an all-in-one news monitoring tool that covers both digital and traditional media sources.

Cision Communications Cloud makes it easy to collect media mentions from news articles, radio broadcast, or online media.

The tool offers other features that might be useful for PR professionals:

  • Relationship Management: The tool offers an influencer database that allows outreach and improves establishing PR relations
  • Audiences & Attribution: Cision Communications Cloud helps you analyze whether or not your PR campaigns reach your target audience
  • Analysis and reporting: The tool has some great reporting features so that users can easily build the story around data and draw insights

Price: Calculated individually according to your team needs.

Meltwater

It’s another news monitoring tool that covers traditional and digital media. Meltwater tracks online news, social media platforms, print media, broadcasts, and podcasts. Apart from media monitoring service, Meltwater offers comprehensive media analysis:

  • Customizable dashboards to share results with other stakeholders
  • AI-powered reporting
  • Translations
  • Social measurement
  • Sentiment scoring
  • Influencer identification
  • Meltwater simplifies real-time data monitoring with revamped tool | PR Week

On the downside, Meltwater is not transparent with their pricing plans, although it offers a few tiers of the news monitoring services.

Price: Contact sales.

SentiOne

It’s a social listening and customer service automation tool that allow news monitoring across social media, portals, forums and blogs.

SentiOne offers also insights into various metrics connected to the online performance of the keywords you monitor: conversation volume, engagement, share of voice, sentiment analysis, influencer identification, and more.

The tool offers two pricing versions – Team Plan (for individual users, SMBs, bloggers, and journalists), and Enterprise Plan (for marketing agencies, brand managers, and research agencies).

Price: Team Plan costs $300 / month, Enterprise Plan is calculated individually.

Keep track of the most important news!

TVEyes

If you are looking for a tool that is able to do news monitoring in traditional media, you might want to try TVEeyes. The platform allows users to monitor, report, analyze, and archive news from the biggest international markets.

The tool has been highly appreciated by the United States Department of Defence as their sole provider of their news monitoring.

Unfortunately, if you want to monitor other news outlets than TV and radio you will need to supply TVEyes with other news monitoring providers.

Price: Contact sales.

Critical Mention

Critical Mention is another news monitoring tool which covers TV, radio, social media, news sites, and the Internet. The monitoring service supports broadcast monitoring, online news monitoring, and social media monitoring, too.

It has been praised for quick and easy access to monitored news. Critical Mention makes it easy to share the most critical online news with your team.

Price: Calculated individually.

Mention

With Mention, brands and businesses can do news monitoring on the web and in social media. You can set up advanced notifications based on a multitude of filters.

Apart monitoring, Mention also provides analytics brands can use to measure opinions, identify influencers, and generate reports about their online presence. Additionally, you can set up keyword alerts or use their social media planner.

Overall, it’s a reasonably-priced tool for news monitoring beginners.

Price: The cheapest plan costs $41 (monthly).

Agility PR Solutions

With their slogan “Media relations streamlined”, Agility PR Solutions is a complete suite for PR professionals seeking a news monitoring tool that does a little bit more than just media monitoring.

Apart from monitoring news sites, the tool includes also a media database that helps to identify influencers in your niche, and keep contacts in one place.

Additionally, Agility PR Solutions offer exclusive daily media briefs, hand-made PR measurements, in-depth insights, and much more. Overall, it’s a great PR tool for people looking for an all-in-one public relations platform with news monitoring.

Price: Calculated individually.

Dataminr

Dataminr is an AI-powered PR tool for real-time monitoring and risk detection.

The tool uses Web monitoring to detect high-impact events and emerging risks that may negatively influence the corporate reputation management. This feature is useful for all PR professionals who want to stay alert and immediately respond to any negative feedback to avoid PR crises.

Dataminr is mostly recommended for big publishers. Among others, CNN, Al Jazeera and AccuWeather use the tool as a go-to media monitoring service.

Price: Contact sales.

Yes, Google Trends can also be used as a successful news monitoring tool. Unlike other apps mentioned in this thread, Google Trends relies on manual browsing. This solution might seem inconvenient at first, but on the other hand it gives you a free opportunity to browse through thousands of new and emerging trends in your area of interest.

This tool will be useful for journalists, content editors, researchers and other creative minds looking for inspiration. It will NOT be useful for companies looking for brand mentions – for this purpose you want to try Google Alerts.

Price: Free

Prowly

Prowly is another popular PR tool with news and social media monitoring features.

The main solutions Prowly offers are:

  • media database,
  • press releases creator,
  • media pitching tool,
  • PR CRM,
  • online newsroom,
  • media monitoring,
  • and PR reports.

To sum up, Prowly would be a good choice for PR teams looking for a tool to collect social media brand mentions and maintain the media database.

Price: Starts at $339 / month.

NewsDashboard

Another news monitoring tool on our list is NewsDashboard. It uses a news SEO tool to increase your brand visibility in Google News and Top Stories in Google SERPs. It monitors the news rankings to provide the best insights on improving your overall search visibility.

NewsDashboard will provide you with the latest keyword mentions and suggest topic clusters you can cover to increase your brand’s visibility.

Price: Contact sales.

Keep track of the most important news!

How to track news coverage?

Before you decide on news monitoring tool, you should assess your needs.

Ask yourself — what news sources do you want to monitor? Do you want to focus on online content? Or will print sources suffice? Will your clients need customised reports?

Another aspect of news monitoring you should take into account is the goal you want to achieve? Do you want to monitor specific topic or brand? Or do you want to track your competitors?

Hopefully, the list of tools above will help you find the best news monitoring app that will meet your needs and help with your research.

Benefits of news monitoring

News monitoring, the practice of consistently tracking various media sources for information about specific topics of interest, plays a crucial role in the information management and strategic planning of any individual, business, or organization. Here are ten benefits of implementing a robust news monitoring practice:

  1. Real-time updates. News monitoring helps you stay abreast of the latest developments, often in real-time, allowing for quick responses or adaptations to new information, critical for things like stock trading, crisis management, or timely opportunities for marketing strategies.
  2. Crisis management. By keeping an eye on what is being said about your organization or field, you can quickly detect negative trends or publicity and respond promptly. This rapid response helps in managing potential crises by addressing issues before they escalate, protecting brand reputation.
  3. Competitive analysis. News monitoring allows businesses to keep track of their competitors’ activities, strategies, and public reception. Understanding your competition’s strengths and weaknesses can inform more effective strategies for your business or project.
  4. Market trends. Keeping informed about industry shifts, customer preferences, and emerging markets enables companies to make data-driven decisions and stay ahead or adapt in their market. This awareness prevents businesses from falling behind or missing key adaptations in their sector.
  5. Customer insights. By monitoring news and social media, organizations can gauge public opinion, gather feedback on products or services, and understand customer needs and perceptions, helping to tailor marketing efforts, improve customer service, and enhance product development.
  6. Risk management. Regular monitoring can help in identifying potential risks and threats to a business or sector early on. Whether these risks are reputational, financial, operational, or legal, early detection is key in formulating strategies to mitigate these risks.
  7. Opportunity identification. Constant awareness of the news landscape can help identify new business opportunities, like untapped markets, potential partnerships, or gaps in services or products that your organization can fulfill.
  8. Public relations strategy. Understanding the media landscape and the current news cycle is invaluable for organizations in crafting their public relations and communication strategies. It helps in finding the right timing and context for press releases or any other public statements.
  9. Legal and regulatory compliance. For many organizations, staying informed about legal and regulatory changes is essential. News monitoring in this aspect helps ensure that your organization gets timely updates on relevant laws, policies, or regulations, preventing non-compliance issues.
  10. Internal communication and employee engagement. Sharing relevant news internally can help keep employees informed and engaged, understanding how their work fits into the larger industry context. This approach can improve morale, productivity, and alignment with the organization’s mission and goals.

In an age of information overload, dedicated news monitoring – whether manually or through automated services – ensures that the most relevant and impactful data is what ends up in front of decision-makers, enhancing both proactive and reactive strategic planning.

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