Professor Side’s PR Course Extra Edition! Sunny-chan reports on the surprisingly amazing world of clipping services.
Hello, I am Sunny-chan from PR.
As an extra edition of Professor Side’s PR Course, we are bringing you a report on a recent training session that our junior employees attended at the clipping company Japan Press Agency!
Japan Press Agency provides services such as newspaper and magazine clipping, TV and web monitoring, and the measurement and analysis of mass media exposure effectiveness.
At SUNNY SIDE UP, we primarily request research and clipping for newspapers and magazines to see how the PR projects we manage are being introduced as news. While we can track the publication dates of media outlets that have conducted interviews in advance, it is impossible to know about every single article beforehand. Therefore, we request these surveys to ensure everything is properly monitored.
In fact, we previously featured photos of clipped articles in the regional newspaper edition of Professor Side’s “Not in the Textbooks” PR Course on this blog.
Since it is particularly difficult to constantly monitor regional newspapers and trade journals, we often rely on the clipped articles sent by Japan Press Agency to check the content of the coverage.
During the training, we were shown how the clipping process is actually carried out.
This is the magazine department. Specific staff members are assigned to check certain magazines, and every day, the magazines they are responsible for are placed in their designated areas.
Japan Press Agency currently handles approximately 2,500 requested projects. The themes and keywords requested are constantly changing, with about 30 new words added every day. What surprised us most, however, was “how” they conduct the checks.
Incredibly, the staff members memorize approximately 2,500 themes and keywords and search for those words within their assigned newspapers and magazines! And of course, they do this visually!
Our team members were fascinated by the freshly cut article clippings!
They handle 2,406 different newspapers and magazines and approximately 2,200 websites. It is truly a display of master craftsmanship!
Finally, we took a clipping test ourselves.
We had to find 28 keywords within a provided newspaper within a 20-minute time limit.
This test is apparently used in actual training exams, and a score of roughly 50% is considered a passing grade.
As for Sunny-chan… she managed to score 16 points, just reaching the passing mark! (What a relief…)
However, taking the test made me realize once again how high the quality of the research conducted by everyone at Japan Press Agency truly is!
I must admit that some of the keywords were terms I was seeing for the first time, and it took much longer to find them compared to words I already knew. I felt the high level of individual ability required to first properly understand the request (themes and words), then read the articles and select them accurately.
It was a great learning experience to see how the clipping articles we see every day are checked! While Sunny-chan brought you this extra edition, please look forward to the next installment of Professor Side’s PR Course!
