Who will save PR professionals from the negative news nightmare? Before I get into this, let us set the scene. Imagine this: You are a PR professional, swamped with idea conceptualization, media engagements, stakeholder engagement, press releases, client approvals, and a never-ending to-do list. Suddenly, a message pops up from your client:
“Hey, did you see this negative news about us?”
Your heart skips a beat. Your face? A mix of confusion and dread. You check your media monitoring alerts—nothing. You scramble through Google—there it is. And then it hits you: your client found this before you did. The unspoken words in that message?
“Aren’t you supposed to be on top of this?”
Now, before you hang me for stating the obvious, let me explain.
I have spent over a decade working with multiple media monitoring tools—some great, some just there, and some that make you question life choices. And let me tell you, no tool is built to single-handedly protect PR professionals from one of their worst nightmares: missing negative news before the boss or client finds it first. Don’t get me wrong—automated media monitoring tools do what they were designed to do. They churn out reports, track keyword mentions, and alert you when your brand name pops up somewhere. But they don’t think. They don’t prioritize what truly matters in near real-time. And if you work in PR, you know that one missed crisis can undo months—even years—of hard work.
Here is where human-curated media monitoring comes in. This isn’t about throwing away your monitoring tool—it is about adding brains to the machine. Human analysts sit behind these tools, filtering through the noise, spotting what really matters, and making sure the most critical updates land on your desk before your client or boss finds them. It is not just about negative news. Human-curated services catch things automated tools often miss—like a journalist misspelling your CEO’s name, your logo being used incorrectly, or a miscaptioned photo that could cause PR damage. An algorithm won’t flag these nuances, but a trained analyst will. And that is the difference between knowing about a problem and managing it before it spirals into a full-blown crisis.
One of the worst situations I have seen? A client forwarding negative news to their PR agency before the agency had even caught wind of it. Now, we all know the unspoken words that follow when that happens:
“This doesn’t look good for you.”
It is enough to make you break out in a cold sweat! The real issue here isn’t just the tool you are using; it is about how that tool is supported by human intelligence. No media monitoring tool currently on the market filters out just the negative news and plants it right in front of your face. They all do the same thing: send you alerts about your brand stories, whether positive, negative, neutral, or balanced. The tools, after all, were programmed to work this way, and it is not their fault. The pain point arises when PR pros have to sift through all that noise to get to what really matters.
Let me share a personal experience. During my first competitive pitch as the founder of P+ Measurement Services , we were invited to pitch to a well-known tobacco company. Now, there were three other agencies competing—one local and two international media monitoring agencies. Yes, we won that pitch, and the feedback was humbling. The client said,
“We are looking for an agency that will be humanly responsible to keep an eye on our brand in the media as our media watchdog and provide us with local media intelligence to drive our communications and PR engagement.”
Fast forward seven years, and we are still providing that service to the same client and more. What was the differentiator? We used tools, yes, but it was the human support behind the tools that provided invaluable media monitoring, intelligence, and analytics.
Beyond just detecting negative news, these human analysts can identify subtle nuances that automated tools often miss—like spelling errors in a brand’s name, the incorrect use of a CEO’s image, a miscaptioned photo, or even the wrong logo used in a major publication. Imagine the embarrassment when your boss flags a wrong spelling of the company name, and you, the PR professional, missed it. The automated tools are not designed to catch these kinds of errors, and it is unfair to blame them when they don’t. But human-curated services? They go above and beyond to ensure these mistakes are flagged and addressed before they turn into PR disasters.
So, the next time you are reviewing your PR budget to include media monitoring, ask yourself:
- Who will make my job easier—just a media monitoring tool or a media intelligence partner that ensures I sleep better at night?
- Who will I hold accountable if a negative story slips through the cracks while I am in function or having my lunch or a dinner with my spouse?
- Will a tool catch that tiny but costly brand name error before my boss does?
- When a crisis brews, do I want automated alerts—or real intelligence that helps me act fast?
The choice is clear. While AI and automation are great, human intelligence is what truly saves PR professionals from their worst nightmares.
And trust me, in this industry, peace of mind is priceless.
Philip Odiakose is a leader and advocate of public relations monitoring, measurement, evaluation and intelligence in Africa. He is also the Chief Media Analyst at P+ Measurement Services, a member of AMEC, NIPR, AMCRON, ACIOM and Founding Member of AMEC Lab Initiative
