Press clippings

One of the differences between advertising and publicity is that you can absolutely control the words in an ad, but reporters and editors absolutely control the words that appear editorially. The only way to know what they say is to see what they say, and it makes sense to keep a copy on hand. The item you copy or snip out of the publication is called a clip.

Informal service.

We use to read a few hundred issues of things each month (you probably read more than a few dozen yourself), and made a practice of forwarding the mentions of our clients we would see in our readings. We presented this as an informal clipping service, since even that number was much less comprehensive than the thousands of publications that a professional clipping service provides. Do you need a clipping service? Do you need clips? What can you do with them? What are the gotchas?

Formal services.

The costs of professional clipping services can run from about $100 a month to thousands, depending on what you want and when you need it. No one service is that much more prompt or more complete than another; all miss clips, and all seem to take forever. Generally, they will send a clip tagged with the publication, circulation, issue date and clip date. But what would you do with a drawer full of envelopes full of clips?

Reports.

Some of the services offer reporting options. You can use them to view an audit trail of a news item's full history, showing who ran it and when and how big. You can request a valuation of the space your news occupied if it had to be bought as advertising, or set your own reporting criteria. Are these reports any more meaningful than clips?

Options.

Most services offer to clip your competition as well, and some will perform competitive scoring. Is this important? The truth is, few people who get clips put them to any productive use. Of those who do use them, most just create and circulate scrapbooks, sometimes as a way to fan the flames of morale, sometimes as a way to justify their own jobs. Some use clips as a way to reference (editorially generated) reader inquiries to specific products or offerings. Some use them in bulk as ammunition to justify annual budgets. Some use them to meter audience interest, as interpreted by the editors, before developing advertising buys.

Caveat emptor.

If you get the feeling that we view clips as a low priority, you're right. Their effective employment as an informational tool for management is so rare and so rarely necessary as to be out of consideration; their misuse is rampant and their shortcomings are pervasive. Still, the bottom line is that clips make the accomplishment of publicity more tangible; that's why most people really bother with them, and why we performed that informal clipping service. As long as 
you realize what you are - and aren't - getting with clips, the "warm fuzzies" they bring justify their existence. Who knows? You may be the one person to find a meaningful way to use them that the rest of us never imagined.