Introduction
The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is among the largest think tanks in the United States. Supported by an independent donor base, AEI’s primary mission is to publish research on public policy in both domestic and international contexts. AEI functions more like an academic institution than a business, employing scholars who contribute to the public policy conversation through research and op-eds. AEI relies on a dedicated donor network so clear metrics on how scholars’ work appears in the media are crucial. We had the pleasure of speaking with Richard Myslinski, the Director of Digital Strategy, about how NewsCatcher helps them achieve this.
How NewsCatcher Supports AEI’s Analysis
AEI uses NewsCatcher to track around 100 of its own scholars and a comparable group from competing think tanks across a curated list of about 50 priority outlets. The resulting comparisons help AEI demonstrate to donors how its thought leadership measures up against competitors, specifically regarding total coverage and market share. AEI takes advantage of both the deduplication feature of NewsCatcher as well as the author field to track their outlets of interest and mention of scholars.
Benchmarking NewsCatcher Against Alternatives
In evaluating the best way to capture accurate publication data, AEI tested several services, including Perigon, newsdata.io, and newsapi.org. These results were compared against years of manually collected information as a benchmark. The analysis showed that NewsCatcher delivered the highest accuracy in matching authors to their published work, which is crucial for AEI’s objective of tracking scholar mentions. Competing services sometimes provided incomplete or incorrect author information, undermining AEI’s ability to reliably compare the coverage.
“When we ran lists of authors through NewsCatcher, it found around 20% more articles than competitors. The other solutions we were looking at missed many articles that Newscatcher had.”
Potential Future Use Cases
AEI may expand its monitoring to include instances where scholars are quoted, rather than solely credited as authors, for a more holistic view of media presence. Another possibility involves integrating their tracking solution directly with AEI’s Salesforce environment to provide real-time updates for scholars and their assistants. Both steps would further refine how AEI tracks and shares its influence with key stakeholders.
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