These services tend to specialize their coverage by subject, industry, size, geography, publication, journalist, or editor.
[1] An agency named "L'Argus de la presse" was established in Paris in 1879 by Alfred Cherie, who offered a press-clipping service to Parisian actors, enabling them to buy reviews of their work rather than purchasing the whole newspaper.
[1] Initially, press clipping services primarily served "vanity" purposes: actors, tycoons, and socialites eager to read what newspapers had written about them.
The idea behind clipping services, that information could be isolated from its original publication, influenced the interfaces of digital news sources such as LexisNexis, enabling users to search by keywords.
[3] Online tools such as Google Alerts notify services and individual users of results for specific terms and names.
Digital delivery allows the end user to receive via email all the relevant news of the company, competition and industry daily, with updates as they break.
In addition to tracking their own publicity, self-generated or otherwise, news monitoring clients also use the service to track competition or industry specific trends or legislation, to build a contact base of reporters, experts, leaders for future reference, to audit the effectiveness of their PR campaigns, to verify that PR, marketing and sales messages are in sync, and to measure impact on their target market.
Television news monitoring companies, especially in the United States, capture and index closed captioning text and search it for client references.
Online media monitoring services utilize automated software called spiders or robots (bots) to automatically monitor the content of free online news sources including newspapers, magazines, trade journals, TV station and news syndication services.
Essentially the two cases covered the same issue (media clippings shown to clients online) and with the same defendant, Meltwater Group.