This blog follows two previous posts – introducing a series on the use of AI tools for communications teams, and one on how I used it to build this website.
Media monitoring is a pain which most organisations solve by throwing money at the issue. Trade media is usually hidden behind logins, national media behind paywalls. The previous solutions? Either a very expensive and frustrating media monitoring system, or a completely inadequate mix of Google Alerts, daily subscriber emails, and human curation.
The costs can soon mount up with traditional media monitoring providers like Vuelio, Meltwater or Signal AI (to name a few). Pricing is often opaque, and seemingly based on what they think they can get away with – don't expect to pay less than £10k a year for even the most basic service. Additional costs come if you want access to a (often out of date) journalist database, to share content internally with colleagues, to keep broadcast clips, or to access paywalled or subscriber-only content. After a year, you'll have the NLA (the licensing agency for newspapers) come knocking for their annual subscription too.
The platforms have often offered a poor user experience. It's challenging to track issues, ensure it's looking at the right sources, and you have to spend an inordinate amount of time adding content it has previously missed. While some providers also search social media, heaven forbid if the three-letter acronym of your organisation is the same as a regional football federation (this happened to me!). CEO asks you to launch a new campaign? Sorry, you're now over your limit, so you'll have to delete a bunch of searches you'd previously spent days setting up in order to launch a new one.
The other solution isn't much better. Expect disparate coverage of issues, slow Google Alerts, numerous emails from news providers, challenging social media searching, and a huge amount of time spent on human curation – five hours a week for an internal email which most likely won't get regularly opened.
How AI offers another way
With my thinking cap on and a subscription to Claude AI, I set to work. Could we build a better – and free – alternative for smaller communications teams?
The initial questioning explored how it could work in practice, what we should offer in terms of information, and how useful it might be. It suggested some ideas, I explored others. I gave it a brief of creating a tool for press offices in the construction industry, along with a list of relevant trade media outlets, and off Claude went.
What we've built is the product of around two hours' work. The fully branded working dashboard, which uses a snapshot of articles from 13–14 July 2026, is fully interactive and designed to demonstrate some of the functionality that's possible:
- A summary of the news stories across the last 48 hours.
- The top four news stories.
- Trending topics.
- Competitor and company mentions.
- A fully searchable live feed of news as it's published.
- A database of news sources with information on their reach.
- A list of journalists who have written the articles.
- The ability to generate a PDF download of the day's briefing.
All of that for the same price as a Google Alert. Click below to explore my dashboard in action.
Taking it further
There is, of course, more that could be done depending on the type of organisation you're working for, the scope of what you need, and how helpful it will be. The obvious one omitted here is company mentions.
- Content: add company mentions to the mix. Use Claude to provide sentiment analysis (positive, neutral, negative), AVE estimates, or calculations on potential reach.
- Content: add political monitoring (search Hansard and related sources) or social media to the mix.
- Content: track personal mentions of colleagues in the media, and track competitors' products and services.
- Content: create team or campaign-specific dashboards. Want to help your External Affairs team? Create a political or external stakeholder dashboard.
- Reporting: track organisation mentions and industry issues over time, with interactive charts you can export to Excel, Word or PDF based on your reporting requirements.
- Reporting: ask Claude to summarise media mentions over the last month, six months, or year – what have been the best stories, how were they received, what generated the most coverage.
- Distribution: set up a morning daily email to colleagues, with thematic versions for different teams.
- Distribution: publish a live feed of news or media mentions on your SharePoint, intranet or website, or have it post automatically to a Teams or Slack channel.
- Archive and curation: favourite articles to return to in future.
Verdict: a clear winner
While there remain some use-cases which require more sophisticated and immediate monitoring and alert systems – established brands and publicly-facing companies, for example – there are numerous occasions where the high cost of media monitoring becomes hard for smaller organisations to justify.
You may not be pushing out press releases every week, but all organisations should be keeping on top of industry conversations and tracking company mentions. The dashboard I created helps immensely with that, and the ability to have a bespoke tool fitting your organisational needs almost completely – for essentially nothing – is hard to ignore. While not right for every company, a bespoke monitoring dashboard will beat what you're currently achieving for free with Google Alerts, newsletter subscriptions, and your colleagues' time.
Interested in exploring how a monitoring dashboard could help your organisation? Get in touch today.
