In the past it was difficult, time consuming and expensive to monitor the news. Now we have Google News Alerts. [First published February 2004. There are now many more tools you can use to track mentions of yourself or your projects, but Google Alerts remains very useful.]
Your community group or business needs to monitor the news. What are people saying about you and your projects? Not just in New Zealand, but worldwide.
In the past it was difficult, time consuming and expensive to monitor the news like this. Now we have Google News Alerts.
Google News Alerts are emails automatically sent to you by Google when there’s news about a topic of interest to you. You specify words likely to appear in articles about your topic and Google finds and delivers the news to you as it appears online.
Visit www.google.com/alerts to sign up.
Enter the topic you’re interested in. For example I recently tracked mentions of Webstock. Next choose how often you’d like to receive your News Alerts: once a day or as they happen.
Google sends you a confirmation email and you must confirm your request before Google will begin checking for news on your topic.
The FAQ at gives you details about the service, including an assurance that: your email address does not get shared, traded, sold, delivered, revealed, publicized or marketed in any way shape or form.
The alerts that arrive contain a title and source, along with a couple of lines of text from the news item and a link to the original article. I’ve been tracking news about Webstock for a couple of weeks now, receiving a couple of emails per day, some with one item, others with dozens.
This service is free and efficient. It should be an important part of your toolkit for monitoring news about your organisation and its work.
Written for and reproduced from CommunityNet Aotearoa Panui, February 2004, and modified for use here.
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