Finding the Needle Without
Getting Buried in the Haystack

To find all of the news about your company, clients or competitors that is posted to the Web, you must gain access to premium content - the online publications that are only available to paid subscribers. Free online news searching merely scratches the surface, because many of the stories that are posted to newspaper and magazine Web sites are not available free-of-charge. It is good to know that as a BurrellesLuce client, you gain complete access to these publications through our service.

Another distinguishing characteristic of our service comes in the form of advanced search technology that enables us to set parameters on your search to eliminate extraneous or repetitious articles. It may come as a surprise to you to learn that free portions of news Web sites typically contain a great deal of repetitious syndicated material that is not necessarily included in the print version of the publication. In fact, a recent BurrellesLuce analysis of the Web sites of leading daily newspapers (not to be confused with the electronic version of the print edition) revealed that the amount of wire (or non-original) stories posted can equal or even exceed the total number of articles appearing in the entire print newspaper.

The lack of a truly comprehensive source list in combination with inadequate search techniques leaves those who are trying to independently monitor online news at a distinct disadvantage. While they may retrieve some of what they are looking for, they can most assuredly count on missing a vital portion of their news coverage, and will certainly be inundated with syndicated articles that are exact replicas of each other. Sometimes this kind of duplicity is favored by those who are interested in retrieving all relevant articles that appear in every source, but many of our clients confine their search to the original story and would find this kind of redundancy exasperatingly time consuming.

Understanding the intricacies of Web source lists and employing search techniques that limit search retrieval in meaningful ways is what clients count on us to do. When you hire BurrellesLuce to monitor the media, you can expect that we will be monitoring all of the premium content as well as publications, blogs and forums that do not require a subscription. Just as important, you can be assured that we’ll be using the most sophisticated search techniques and technologies, enabling us to drill down into these sources and retrieve relevant material.

Another essential component in our production process is our unwavering insistence on the editing of all news before it is ever sent to our clients. An analysis of the BurrellesLuce production process has revealed that our editors typically discard 80% of all articles that are retrieved by our initial electronic searches. This disposal rate is not a reflection of poorly worded search terms, but rather, an indication of the routine volume of irrelevant news and repetitious material that must be waded through to provide only the stories that are really of interest to our clients. This unique level of “human-touch” editing saves BurrellesLuce clients significant time and money.

BurrellesLuce monitors over 4,300 Web editions of newspapers and magazines, nearly 3,500 Web-only news sources, more than 50,000 Web forums and 17 million blogs. A significant percentage of this source list is premium content, which is only accessible through a paid subscription.