Recently, I found a media hit through Google on an event by my organization that did not show up in Meltwater. It was an independent broadcast station in Philadelphia, big enough that I was surprised the hit wasn’t included.
How do I search Meltwater’s media database to see if this outlet is on it? Is there a way to see Meltwater’s media list? Does it include magazines? Hyper-local weeklies? Trade journals? Peer-reviewed journals? Does Meltwater have media lists for every city/town in the U.S., or are there any holes?
In short, I would like to know how many and which news outlets are being scanned when I monitor our media coverage. Is that information available? Specifically, I am interested in Greater Chicago, Greater Philadelphia, all of Massachusetts, and national media outlets.
Thanks so much,
Norreida
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Hi @Norreida - the Meltwater database is constantly growing and changing, so there is not a comprehensive list that you can check for this.
However, if you have the name of the source, you can use the sourceName operator to search for coverage from that source. For example, to find coverage from The Philadelphia Inquirer, you can use the boolean:
sourceName:"The Philadelphia Inquirer"
You can also point blank ask the AI Search Assistant if a particular source that you’re looking for is covered. I don’t know specifically which independent station you are looking for, but I asked if Philly57 was in the database, and here are my results:
Does this help cover what you need?
I forgot to mention in my response, that if you notice that Meltwater is not monitoring a specific source, you can request that the source be added to the Meltwater Platform. To do this, simply contact Meltwater support via live chat.
It picked up the other Philadelphia hit in Metro Philadelphia, print/online, but not the broadcast hit. I searched All News. Does broadcast get missed sometimes?
Hey @Norreida - I repeated this query to the AI Search Assistant and I got the same results - that PHL17 is in the database. However, when I searched sourceName:”PHL17” I didn’t get any results, so I tried just searching “PHL17” without the source name operator and got back quite a few hits, and discovered this way that the source name in the database is actually “WPHL (CW)”
Once I adjusted my search to sourceName:”WPHL (CW)” I hit the payload
I then tried this search:
sourceName:"WPHL (CW)" AND "cradles to crayons"
When I adjusted the date range to the past 30 days, I got 4 mentions, all from February 20th.
As for why this didn’t show up in your initial search, it’s hard to say without taking a deeper look at how your search is constructed. If you’d like to share your search here I’d be happy to dig into it with you, otherwise it might be a good idea to raise this with our product support team via live chat or by sending them an email at help@meltwater.com.
I hope this helps a bit and as always let me know if you have additional questions!
Oh, but I hadn’t applied the All News filter set, so that seems to actually be where the problem might be. Once I applied that filter set, my results disappeared! So it appears that PHL17 is not classified as a news source by the database. I’m going to do a little more poking around and I’ll follow up here when I have more info...
Thank you, @Jacinda Espinosa! I so appreciate your help!
With gratitude,
Norreida
Ok, last reply (I think )
When you select the All Sources | News filter, this will only select the News content type for your search. News includes copyrighted content from news sources such as The New York Times, BBC, CNN, local newspapers, and online journals. Generally, content posted on television networks' websites should also be classified as News, but I’m guessing that since PHL17 is not strictly a news network and is also a CW outlet that it doesn’t show in this category. To get it to show up, I took the following steps:
Under the Filter Set dropdown, I selected All Sources | News and ran the search sourceName:”WPHL (CW)” AND “cradles to crayons” - this returned 0 results.
Under the Source type dropdown, News was already selected. I also checked the box next to Broadcast and ran the search again. This returned the 4 results I had found earlier with no filters applied
Under the Filter Set dropdown (which will now say All Sources | News), you can select Save As and give your filter a name (I chose All Sources | News + Broadcast)
Now you can run your search using this saved filter set for more comprehensive coverage
You may need to scroll down a little in the dropdown menu to find your new filter set
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