The news monitoring toolfor brands the press writes about

News monitoring is the process of tracking and analyzing mentions of your brand, products, competitors, or industry keywords across news publications in real-time. Without news monitoring, you miss critical coverage about your brand including press reviews and product mentions, competitor announcements and market shifts, industry trends and analyst coverage, negative press before it spreads, and opportunities to amplify positive coverage.

News monitoring is tactical and focuses specifically on news publications, blogs, and press outlets, tracking specific keywords, brand mentions, and industry coverage with real-time alerts for immediate action. Social listening is strategic and monitors conversations across social platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and LinkedIn, analyzing broader trends, sentiment, and themes by aggregating data over time for insights. Octolens provides both capabilities in one platform.

News monitoring helps you identify press coverage opportunities, manage your reputation proactively, track competitor announcements and positioning, discover journalist and analyst coverage of your space, respond quickly to negative press, and amplify positive coverage by being first to engage when it matters.

Octolens monitors over 150,000 news sources worldwide, including major publications like TechCrunch, The Verge, and Wired, industry-specific blogs and trade publications, regional and international news outlets, and tech and business press. Our comprehensive coverage ensures you never miss relevant mentions of your brand or competitors.

Most news alerts arrive within 15-30 minutes of publication. Our system continuously scans news sources and delivers alerts via your preferred channel - email, Slack, or webhook - so you can respond quickly to time-sensitive coverage.

Yes! Octolens handles all the technical complexity for you. Simply enter your keywords and we automatically monitor relevant news sources. No RSS feeds, no manual setup, no maintenance required.

Yes! You can monitor multiple keywords including your brand name, product names, competitor names, industry terms, executive names, or any other relevant keywords. Each keyword can have its own alert settings and filters.

You can monitor all types of news content including news articles, press releases, blog posts, opinion pieces, analyst reports, and industry publications. We track both headlines and full article content to ensure comprehensive coverage.

Yes! Add competitor names as keywords to track their media mentions alongside yours. Many customers use this for competitive intelligence, share of voice analysis, and identifying journalists who cover their space.

News, podcast, web, and newsletter coverage is included on the Scale and Enterprise plans. The Pro plan covers social and community platforms (Reddit, X, LinkedIn, Hacker News, and more). Your mention limit applies across all platforms combined.

Yes, you can filter mentions by source type, domain authority, region, and language. This helps you focus on high-impact coverage from reputable publications and filter out low-quality sources.

Our AI analyzes sentiment for every mention, categorizing coverage as positive, negative, or neutral. You can set up alerts specifically for negative coverage, enabling you to respond quickly to potential reputation issues before they escalate.

Yes, webhook support is included on all plans. Send news alerts to Slack, your CRM, custom dashboards, or any system that accepts webhooks. We also provide API access and MCP server integrations on all plans for advanced workflows.

Yes, you can export your news monitoring data as CSV. We also provide webhook, API, and MCP server integrations for connecting with your existing tools and automating workflows.

News monitoring is part of the Octolens Scale plan at $599/month, or $499/month billed annually — which includes coverage of 150,000+ news sources plus podcasts, newsletters, and the web, alongside all social platforms. Octolens comes with a free 7-day trial. For comparison, enterprise media monitoring suites like Meltwater run a median of $25,800/year in contract data, and Google Alerts is free but delayed and incomplete.

The best way to monitor news is automated keyword tracking: pick the brand names, competitors, and industry terms you care about, and let a monitoring tool scan news outlets continuously and alert you within minutes of publication. Manual approaches — checking publications by hand or relying on daily Google Alerts digests — miss syndicated coverage and trade press, and surface stories after the response window has closed. The alerts should land where your team already works (Slack, email, or via webhook into your own systems), not in another dashboard you have to remember to check.

It depends on what 'media' means for you. If you need broadcast TV, radio, and print clipping plus a journalist database, enterprise suites like Cision, Meltwater, or Onclusive lead the category — at enterprise contract prices. If you need online coverage — news articles, blogs, newsletters, podcasts, and social platforms — delivered into Slack or your own tools via API, Octolens covers that in one feed with AI relevance filtering, starting at self-serve SaaS pricing.

Google Alerts is the standard free option and a reasonable starting point for a low-volume brand name. Its limits are well documented: digest emails arrive hours or days after publication, coverage of smaller outlets and syndicated articles is patchy, and there's no sentiment analysis, filtering, or integrations. Free tools tell you some of what happened; paid tools are about hearing everything fast enough to act on it.

Press coverage tracking is monitoring where and how often your company appears in published media — articles, reviews, interviews, and analyst notes — and measuring it over time: coverage volume, sentiment, share of voice against competitors, and which publications drive attention. Octolens automates this with per-keyword analytics and exports the underlying data via API, so you can build coverage reports in your own tools instead of screenshotting a dashboard.

Google Alerts is free but unreliable—often delayed by hours or days, missing many mentions, and with no filtering options. Octolens provides real-time alerts, AI-powered relevance scoring, sentiment analysis, and integrations that Google Alerts can't match. Plus, we monitor significantly more sources with better accuracy.

Please contact us at hi@octolens.com and we will be happy to help you.