Valley PR Blog

My clipping service journey

By Len Gutman on September 28th, 2007 In Advice

Earlier this week Charlotte posted about her frustrations with clipping services (I believe she said they suck!). I have always had similar feelings about clipping services, but nevertheless my current business needs have forced my hand and yesterday I opened a national clipping account with BurrellesLuce.

I did some homework on clipping before deciding on BurrellesLuce…and quite frankly it was somewhat overwhelming. There are so many things to consider. Did I need an old school clip service that supplies hard copy clips? Did I need national, regional or local clipping? Did I trust one of the new web-based services? Should I just stick with Google Alerts? What about price?

I found a nice listing of services online and started to go through them, but it was like trying to buy tires or a mattress — imposible to compare apples to apples.

BurrellesLuce offered me an “agency” account that lets me clip for up to five clients for the same cost. I’m paying $327 per month plus $2.42 per clip for national and local clipping. Damn that seems like a lot, but it’s just impossible for me to track all this myself, especially given most of the hits I expect to get for the primary client I’m clipping for will be in trade magazines — many of whom are still not posting the full text of their pubs online. That’s really the issue isn’t it? Otherwise we could just use the Google Alerts or at the very least bookmark all the major sites and check often.

I thought what I’d do is use the blog as a little clipping diary about how things are going. I’ll check in on this subject as events warrant. Meanwhile, if you have had good or bad experiences with clipping go ahead and post comments here. Let’s see if we can get a decent dialogue going about this.

It will be interesting to see what happens with BurrellesLuce. I had a major hit in the Republic today for a client and we should be in the Business Journal today as well. I know it’s less than 24 hours since I started the service — wonder if they’ll capture these two hits? I received a Google Alert on it at a few minutes after midnight this morning!

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