The historical role of the clipping service
Launch library · evergreen read
Before digital monitoring tools genuinely existed, organisations relied heavily on clipping services, teams of people who physically read through publications and cut out relevant articles by hand, to understand what coverage they had actually received across the media landscape. This labour intensive process was, for a very long time, the only genuinely reliable way to track earned media at any real scale.
Clipping services shaped how measurement itself was originally understood within the profession, since the physical, easily countable nature of a clipping naturally encouraged volume based thinking, simply counting articles rather than genuinely assessing their quality or actual effect on an audience's understanding or eventual behaviour.
As digital tools eventually replaced manual clipping entirely, they inherited some of this same volume oriented thinking even while making far more sophisticated analysis technically possible for the first time, a legacy that later measurement practices have had to deliberately work to move beyond over the following decades.