Semi-Automated Media Monitoring on the Cheap
TECH STACKS: Duct Tape, Baling Wire, Spreadsheets and Scripts
We’ve been experimenting with low-cost, makeshift approaches to automated media monitoring and open-source research. The exercise was inspired by three things: the high cost of latest-gen monitoring and subscription platforms, a fascinating academic project using clever LLM prompts, and older, more mature tools like RSS aggregators, spreadsheets and scripts for extracting data from one digital resource and collating it into another.
That pushed us into the arms of Google Sheets, apps, and scripts for Chrome. We’ve cobbled together a Google-ish rig that works reliably and takes some of the pain out of manual media monitoring and reporting. It’s crude, and it’s still a way off from being the kind of automated system that can be readily scaled to accommodate firehose data feeds. Still, it’s a robust building block, and it’s within a few steps of being something more than experimental.
In the main, crude jalopies are worthwhile, especially if the finances for shiny new Jetsons tech just isn’t there. If you don't have the budget for more expensive AI-enabled aggregator and summarisation tools, and the future you can access feels a bit more unevenly distributed, learning how to use the low-cost and old school options is worth the effort. A streamlined, integrated and semi-automated workflow is still within reach - just don’t let it lull you into thinking the output is any more accurate or reliable than, say, a prompt-response coming out of one of the heavy-hitter LLMs.
Is it cost-effective? Yes, in hard currency terms, but that’s only a meaningful savings if you’re already comfortable playing with prompts, scripts, and integrations or can spare the time to learn how. Is it content-effective? It’s a hybrid system, and only part of it is really AI. The part that isn’t AI is clean, organised and reliable, even if it might not satisfy volume-oriented Big Data types. The other part of the system that taps into AI capabilities is interesting, but still fundamentally experimental. At least for systems involved in exploiting high stakes evidence, the answer has to be a qualified no.
Some friends and colleagues in Dubai - grizzled analysts, design nerds and technology cynics - think there’s value in digging into this. We’ll write up the details and see if there’s interest in a small, closed-door workshop to test it out within our niche community of technology-augmented researchers.
Watch this space.
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