A New Way to Make Media Briefings More Engaging (w/ Examples)

Media monitoring newsletters usually aren’t thrilling. Just a list of new mentions without context or insightful analysis.

Clients and stakeholders can't be impressed with that. So, chances are, you’ve already started embellishing your weekly media briefings with short coverage summaries. But doing this manually can take an hour or more.

Read this article to find out:

• How to get the gist from your monitoring results in 5 minutes
• How to refine daily and weekly newsletters with little effort
• How to make briefings more attractive for your boss or client (with examples!)

What should a media briefing email contain?

For quickly communicating your PR outcomes to the team, clients, or higher-ups, all you need is a coverage summary.

Automated monitoring digests with AI coverage summaries

Monitoring digests are notifications that collect all new media mentions from a given period in a single email to help you quickly browse through the updates.

In Prowly, though, this doesn’t mean just a newsletter listing random mentions one by one; Prowly’s digests include AI coverage summaries.

What is an AI coverage summary? It’s an automatically generated, succinct recap of key messages, overarching sentiment, and trending topics in your chosen monitoring searches.

You can add AI coverage summaries to your existing email notifications or create brand-new ones.

How to create monitoring digests

Prowly’s media monitoring covers online, social, print, and broadcast media.

All you have to do to set up your first-ever monitoring digest in Prowly is complete these two steps:

1. Set up media monitoring queries

The intuitive query builder lets you track brands, competitors, keywords, people, and backlinks. Narrowing down results in Prowly is simpler than composing incoherent Boolean strings—just use advanced MUST/CAN/MUST NOT filters.

Want to learn more about building queries in Prowly? Here’s a Help Center article detailing the steps.

Each of the queries you create can be used to set up a monitoring digest in Prowly.

2. Create a notification with tailored details

Just go step by step:

1. Select one or more of your queries for the digest to track
2. Create an internal email name for the team
3. Add the subject line that your recipients will see
4. Include AI coverage summaries
5. Pick recipients; they can be internal and/or external
6. Choose your notification frequency; it can be daily, weekly, monthly, or custom

Each step is an opportunity to tailor the email to your recipients’ needs. But to make sure they’re only receiving the meat and potatoes, you’ll want to add the right filters.

How to customize monitoring digests (+ examples)

At the bottom of the notification builder, the last step is to add your chosen filters to narrow down the mentions your digest will be analyzing.

Here are some examples of how to create digests tailored to specific PR situations you might’ve experienced before:

1. Other teams at your company need competitive insights

You monitor your competitors closely, but your colleagues from business departments (like Marketing, Sales, or Product) don’t have access to your PR tool. Monitoring the media narratives surrounding your competitors is especially valuable for them.

How can you keep these teams updated?

Create a daily, weekly, or monthly monitoring digest to external recipients.

1. Use the queries that track your competitors. You can add more than one query to a single digest.
2. Apply the Article keywords filter if you want to reduce your results to a particular product (for example, “yoga pants”)
3. To further narrow down the area of interest, you can add other filters, such as location, language, or domain category.

By being able to check competitive insights every morning, business departments will experience the amazing value that media monitoring brings.

Regardless of the language you’re monitoring, all AI summaries in Prowly are automatically written in English, so your team and clients can understand. No more wasting time on translation. 

2. The CEO wants to track a thought leadership campaign

You’ve pitched your CEO’s expert comments to various publications in the industry. You’re monitoring your boss’s name and quote keywords in all industry media, but the CEO is interested only in the most prominent online news sources.

How do you calibrate your digest to accommodate this requirement?

Add two filters:

1. Set Source to “News”
2. Set Domain authority to “more than 70” or “more than 80” (depending on what “prominent news sources” mean to you or your boss)

Your CEO is busy and doesn’t want weekly updates or notifications when there’s no new data available. Go to Delivery settings and set the notification frequency to any time you want. You can keep the bottom box “Send a digest even if there is no new data available” unchecked.

3. Product managers want to track recent launches

Your athleticwear brand has just launched a new collection of yoga pants. Product managers need to measure the success of this release.

All you need to do here is schedule a digest for your brand query with the right filter(s). In this case, you can:

1. Use queries tracking the product, or type the product name in the Article keywords filter (general, like “yoga pants” or particular, like “Eva pants”).
2. If the product manager wants to observe product reviews, set the Source filter to Instagram or other social media and add the keyword “review.”
3. Track top media (Source: News, Domain authority: 80+) to get insights about the general narrative.

To get real-time alerts anytime someone mentions your brand in the product context, set up monitoring alerts using the same filters.

4. Your clients need to monitor the industry

Your client is an automotive company. They'd appreciate a weekly intel digest summarizing top news about competitors, customers, and other industry-related info.

With Prowly monitoring digests, you can set up an industry newsletter in a few minutes:

1. Add all relevant queries connected to the industry (for example, “Automotive news”, or “Car manufacturing”).
2. Use the Article keywords filter to track particular trends or topics (such as “Automotive market”).
3. Add external recipients (your clients' email addresses)

PRO TIP: Want to test the digests before you send them out to clients or executives? Try the filters out in your mention browser and make sure Prowly is picking up the right mentions. You can also send yourself a few test digests.

So, how can monitoring digests help you?

Custom, AI-powered monitoring digests change the game when it comes to frequent PR updates. What are the benefits?

Time. 

Once you’ve set up well-calibrated digests, your work is done. The system creates summaries and sends emails for you; your team saves tens of hours monthly.

Want to save time on personalizing pitches? Read this pitch personalization playbook

Improving efficiency helps score points with execs at your company.

Crisis prevention. 

Automatic notifications with mention overview help detect early crisis signals so you can develop emergency strategies on time.

If you’re always the first to know about everything reputation-related, your role in the organization becomes strategic.

Proof of progress. 

Instead of manually writing summaries of what you’ve achieved, your boss can be on the same page just by looking at the AI coverage summaries.

Customization of monitoring digests in Prowly is super-easy, so each person within your company or any client can get just the information they need.

Cyclical summaries of your achievements help prove to non-PR folk that your work bears fruit. And, it’s easier to justify the media monitoring spending if the CEO, CFO, or Director of Marketing can see the value directly.

Added value. 

Your clients expect results, and receiving systematic, professional-looking updates will definitely give them reasons to trust your methods.

It shows you’re proactive—nothing can escape your attention if you’re always one step ahead. Once your clients bite into the updates, they can get involved in catching trends and useful insights themselves.

The cooperation becomes a well-oiled machine, and you get to be the strategic advisor.

Don’t forget: your clients have bosses they want to impress, too. Receiving monitoring digests with key media narratives and competitive intelligence helps them provide value within their company. That’s a bonus they’ll appreciate.

Less noise. 

Prowly gives you multiple ways to narrow down the results appearing in the digests. Filter out the mentions that don’t matter so your frequent updates don’t populate people’s inboxes with junk.

Even better, you can create notifications for multiple queries at once, so fewer notifications are needed.

Try media monitoring digests

Prowly monitoring digests will make your life easier. AI-generated coverage summaries save dozens of hours each month. Personalization options make your media briefings more targeted and impressive to your clients and stakeholders.

Go beyond inefficient tactics–automate mundane media briefings so you can spend time researching, pitching, and fostering strong media relationships.