A keyword match tells you that a story is on-topic. It does not tell you whether there is a media opportunity.
When a communications team is reviewing large volumes of articles across multiple priority themes, that distinction becomes important.
For example, an organisation with artificial intelligence as a strategic priority might reasonably monitor regulation, research breakthroughs, investment, safety, infrastructure, applications and policy. A monitoring system can find all of those things.
The next step can be more difficult. Does the organisation have genuine expertise on the particular issue? Is there someone who can add something that has not already been said? Would the contribution help the journalist? Is the story still developing? Does it support an area where the organisation wants to build visibility?
A story can pass the keyword test and still fail on all of those questions.
Relevance is contextual
The same article can be highly valuable to one organisation and largely irrelevant to another. Useful media intelligence therefore needs more than topic recognition. It needs organisational context. In practice, that means considering strategic fit, spokesperson expertise, the journalist’s interests, timing and any reputational sensitivities together.
Not every team needs a formal scorecard, but it helps to be explicit about what “relevant” means. Otherwise, volume can start to look like intelligence. And volume creates work. Every weak alert still needs somebody to read it, assess it, check the available expertise and decide whether to proceed. Across a busy team, that adds up quickly.
A better test
When an opportunity appears, four questions usually get you closer to an answer:
- Why this story?
- Why us?
- Why this spokesperson?
- Why this journalist, now?
If the answers are convincing, the opportunity is probably worth a closer look. If they are not, finding the right keyword has achieved very little. This is one of the principles behind PitchVector: media signals become more useful when they are connected to organisational priorities, relevant expertise and a clear reason to act.