A lot of companies and organisations pay a lot of money to have their media profile monitored and analysed.

It can be very expensive and beyond the reach of small to medium size enterprises (SMEs).

There are also legal issues such as copyright and fees for copying a press cutting, that are ignored by many organisations. We do not recommend that, as some newspapers and magazines feel very strongly about illegal copying and are starting to take action against those who copy articles without permission.

In the UK these licensing issues are handled by the Newspaper Licensing Agency.

The News Analyser offers a simpler and more affordable alternative.

• The program can collect a number of news stories from over the Internet using NewsScape. The list of web sites searched is being increased all the times.

• Extra stories say from an agency such as Precise, can be added by typing them in directly.

• References on TV and radio can be added in the same way.

• Typically, a story is added by typing in a short precis with a date, time, title and author.

• To get the maximum benefit out of these stories, they should be rated and keyworded. This enables stories to be sorted according to relevance and distributed to the appropriate people.

• The collected stories can then be published to appropriate places on the Internet or the Intranet.