What Does Media Monitoring Actually Measure?

Mentions are the most basic unit of media monitoring. They tell you that an organisation, issue, or individual appeared in coverage. That information is useful, particularly for awareness tracking or issue detection, but it is limited.

A mention does not tell you whether the organisation was central to the story or incidental. It does not explain whether the framing was favourable, critical, or neutral. Most importantly, it does not indicate whether the coverage mattered to anyone who read it or if the publication itself was of significance.

High mention volumes can create a sense of momentum without delivering meaningful influence. Low volumes in the right places can have the opposite effect. This is why mentions should always be treated as a starting point, not a conclusion.

Reach Estimates Potential, Not Trust

Reach attempts to estimate how many people could have seen a piece of coverage. It is often used as a proxy for scale. While reach can help contextualise exposure, it says nothing about credibility or engagement.

A large ‘potential’ audience does not automatically equate to influence. Readers assign different levels of trust to different outlets. An article in a highly credible publication may reach fewer people but carry more weight in shaping opinion, policy discussion, or stakeholder perception.

Everhaze accounts for this by weighting coverage according to the credibility of the outlet itself alongside giving users a more realistic estimated ‘readership’ figure based on verified data. This reflects how reputation actually forms, through trusted sources, not theoretical audience size.

Sentiment Measures Tone, But Only on the Surface

Sentiment analysis, typically linked to natural language processing (NLP) methods, attempts to classify coverage as positive, negative, or neutral. This can be useful for identifying broad trends, particularly at scale. However, sentiment is often reductive and it applies a one-sized fits all approach which is a frustration for experienced strategic communications professionals.

Critical coverage is not always negative. What may appear to be a negative mention of a brand can be intentional, designed to provoke debate or drive publicity. Traditional NLP sentiment analysis struggles to capture this nuance. By applying artificial intelligence, as we do at Everhaze, at a contextual level, it’s now possible to distinguish sentiment from intent, allowing PR professionals to understand how coverage is actually landing and to measure the true impact of campaigns. 

Narrative Measures Direction and Momentum

Looking beyond sentiment analysis is narrative tracking. Story arcs or narratives are not static. They develop over time as stories are repeated, challenged, or reframed. Monitoring narrative means understanding the impact stories are really having in real-time on brands, trends, industries and more.

This is where one-dimensional reporting tools tend to fall short. They give a snapshot of links and approximate numbers, but little overall context or meaning from which executive teams can extract value. Narrative intelligence focuses on trajectory and actionable intelligence. Are you winning the day or is your brand experiencing death by a thousand cuts from the competition or others. Everhaze’s narrative intelligence product, LUMINaiT, is designed to give strategic communications professionals a detailed understanding of brand and industry patterns by analysing core messaging, emerging themes and audiences.

Measuring for Decisions, Not Decoration

The ultimate purpose of media monitoring is not to produce reports, but to support decisions. Metrics only matter if they help teams understand what to do next.

For PR agencies, this means clearer client recommendations and more defensible reporting. For government and semi-state organisations, it supports accountability, risk management, and informed intervention. In both cases, meaningful measurement connects activity to consequence.

When media monitoring focuses on presence, trust, tone, and narrative direction together, it becomes a strategic asset rather than a retrospective summary. Not everything that matters can be reduced to a number. Credibility, trust, and narrative authority are complex, but they are not unknowable. They simply require the right lens.

Understanding what media monitoring actually measures is the first step toward using it properly. The next is knowing how to apply those measurements in context.