We spoke with Val Farabee and Kathleen Miles, the founders of Ex Arca, a consulting company building data products for media monitoring and mapping influence.
About Ex Arca
Ex Arca helps law firms and other organizations monitor global media to identify vulnerabilities and reputational risks for their clients.
Our major focus is mapping influence networks. We research influence, how influence operates, and the capacity and efficacy of an influence network, whether it’s a person, organization, or government. Part of that work naturally includes a lot of media monitoring. When we track a story, our goal is to quickly digest it, create a summary for our clients, and explain to them why that piece of information is critical for them to know.
Problem
Before we started using NewsCatcher, we relied on Google alerts, some scrapers, and a lot of random Google, Bing, and Yandex searches. There are always multitudes of different data points coming in, which can get overwhelming when monitoring global media because alerts are constantly pinging our system. We don’t always need to know that Reuters published a piece, and then 19 other outlets republished the same piece within the next 5 minutes.
Not to mention the confusion due to the lack of a single source. One analyst might get 22 alerts from 9 sources, while another gets 34 from 15 other sources, which creates a need for discussion, some cross-checking, and deduplication. This created a lot of duplicate work, some of which was unavoidable, but would be significantly eased by the introduction of a single source for news media.
Our work is very high-touch, and we have a close working relationship with our clients. Our previous setup enabled us to create a small, organized ecosystem to examine and analyze the subject matter on our clients behalf. As we grew, our clients wanted us to look at narratives across global media, telling us
“I’m interested in Europe, I’m interested in Asia, the US, Canada.” Basically, “I have this global portfolio; tell me everything I need to know all the time."
How do we do that in an efficient and cost effective manner? I can’t just buy a subscription to every single major newspaper in the world and create bespoke scrapers for each one. How do I cross-check what’s being republished widely? What is getting manipulated? What is getting a new take?
Solution
Val was familiar with NewsCatcher because of one of its open-source projects called PyGoogleNews, and she watched the company grow from there.
When Ex Arca started looking for news APIs to see what was available, we wanted a solution where we could import the full article into our system so that our analysts could use it for their own purposes and searches. From the beginning, NewsCatcher was one of our top choices. In the end, NewsCatcher was the clear winner after interviewing several other providers.
On the developer side, the ease of use in deploying is the number one argument for NewsCatcher. We were able to integrate the News API within two days. It was very easy; the API is very easy to use.
You know, I can't speak well enough of the customer support when you (Artem) came in clutch in the middle of the night to help us when we ran out of our API calls suddenly, trying to figure out what was going on.
From the analyst’s perspective, NewsCatcher serves as a single source of data. This helps us optimize our process and spend more time analyzing and less time searching for things. The single source of news data and ease of deployment turned it into a force multiplier for our analysts.
Our clients often have requests like,
“Hey, I just saw this story. Can you give us a summary and tell us why it’s important in the next hour?"
Previously, when we were doing it without NewsCatcher’s NewsAPI, we would have about 30,000 Google alerts we were frantically parsing to make sure we had the whole picture and were not missing the small, vital factoids that our clients pay us to find.
We can now easily accommodate requests like these, in large part because of the media monitoring tool we built with NewsCatcher's help. Our tool, powered by the NewsCatcher API, enables analysts to search, save, and create AI summaries so we can quickly generate a report based on individual client needs.
Results
Using NewsCatcher's News API, the Ex Arca team:
- increased regions monitored from one (North America) to five (Europe, South America, Africa, Asia, and North America).
- went from monitoring roughly three broad topics to 23 topics with specificity.
- saves more than 100 analyst hours every week.
Put simply, Ex Arca is now able to cover more topics and regions with fewer total man hours and provide more in-depth analyses and faster deliverables to their clients by integrating Newscatcher API into its workflow.
Get in touch with us to find out how we can help you with your News needs.