The Wardman Wire

Yesterday I had a look at Monitoring the Commentariat for free. Iain Dale has translated that as:

“Matt Wardman thinks he can put Editorial Intelligence out of business.”

Now there’s another challenge. In the spirit of enquiry and to encourage enterprise (!) I thought I’d do a quick minute rundown of Editorial Intelligence’s services and a few of their potential free competitors.

I’m hoping to return to this subject, but I’m not making a promise.

e.i. Daily Summaries and Digest

Summaries

A summary of all the arguments and opinion published each day in the UK in print and on blogs to bring our clients – by 9 am each weekday.

10 categories:

* All Comment summarised
* Business & Finance
* Environment
* Human Rights, Law, Justice
* Education
* Health, Family & Welfare
* UK & International Politics
* Security & Defence
* Culture, Media & Sport
* Science and Technology

Topic/Keyword searches, updates and feeds can be set up on many services, or via your own RSS reader. If you must have a Daily Summary by email, you can set up as many automatic emails as you like by using services such as those offered by Feedburner.

Digest

Daily Digest is your short cut to knowing the leading comment arguments of the day, in print and on blogs.

It seems to me that politicshome.com cover a lot of this, in a human edited form.

e.i. Commentariat Database

Profiles of the UK’s key print and blog commentators by sourcing their published work and compiling detailed records of publicly available information about their publishing, broadcasting and speaking histories and websites, blogs, agents and publication deadlines.

Wikipedia pages compiled by the wisdom of crowds, profiles on newspaper pages, many commentators have their own websites now.

e.i. Insight Club Networking

Monthly forums for invited guests on a wide range of pressing social and political topics of the day in association with leading partners.

In London especially there are a lot of events of interest to commentators - from seminars at professional societies and the RSA to events at the Frontline Club and public lectures organised by think tanks.

All of these events are published freely as podcasts.

e.i. Training and Workshops

Workshops exploring the role the ‘Commentariat’ play in shaping public opinion and public policy.

As a service dependent on the experience of individuals, this is quite robust to unpaid competition.

e.i. Stakeholder Bulls-ei

Identifying which individuals to contact – not just among the media but amongst other key stakeholder groups, such as within politics and academia and public life.

As a service dependent on the relationships of individuals, this is quite robust to unpaid competition.

e.i Topic Tracker Reports

Track any topic, any keywords and provide actual analysis of how often and how a subject has been commented or, plus contextual political analysis about how the comment has been accompanied by activity in parliament, think tanks, key universities and other stakeholder groups.

Let me quote from my previous article:

The Internet is stuffed with automatic tools to help you get to grips with the flow of comment, including aggregators, specialised search engines (www.technorati.com, Google news and blog search), and services to try and judge what is important (www.technorati.com again, www.wikio.com).

Have a look at some of the options I have put on commentariat.org.uk.

e.i Podcasts and eiTV

Insight Club Networking events are podcast. We have added a visual element to our podcasts and downloads: eiTV in which Chief Executive Julia Hobsbawm interviews a selection of key commentators in the media and public life about the key

These are free to download from the Editorial Intelligence website.

Reflections

The Editorial Intelligence setup is a closed system, and you buy a ticket to access it for a subscription.

Certainly doing your own “Commentariat Monitoring for Free” will not be as slick (yet), but neither does it cost around £4000 per annum.

You will also lose access to the particular set of networking events - but you could do a lot for £4000.

For some organisations the cost is worth it, but for nearly all individuals it probably never has been - and the comparative advantage of having a paid for service will shrink as the playing field becomes more level.

“Paid for” services can aggregate some (but not all - it depends on license terms) of the “free” content back into their own services. And that helps make everything more competitive, which is always good.

It seems to me that the “monitoring the comment” industry may end up resembling the “open source” industry - where the “software” (or in this case the news and comment) is free, and you actually pay on demand for the skills of those who help you interpret it - and their specific domain knowledge for a particular environment. However, that is then back to traditional media consultancy.

Wrapping-Up

Two items I ran across while writing this article.

I can’t find a Wikipedia article about Ms Hobsbawm? Her dad’s in, her brother is in - but she is missing in action. Perhaps someone should write one; a key player in networking between PR and Journalism probably deserves the publicity.

And a wonderful quote from Sarah Sands from a review of Julia Hobsbawm’s book Where the Truth Lies: Morality and Trust in PR and Journalism:

“Authentic journalism cannot be tamed or subdued: it is hit-and-miss, slapstick, occasionally sublime. All the rest is public relations. “

That seems to me to be - in the age of the Commentariat - part of the reason for bloggers to exist.