Press Clipping Service
The envelope is gone. What you want now is an alert the moment a real outlet publishes a page about you.
A press clipping service used to be envelopes. Now it is an alert when a real outlet covers you. The mailroom version had a person with scissors. The software version should not require a person to refresh Google News on a timer.
Agencies still sell "clipping" as a retainer line item. Sometimes that means a human who reads trades. Sometimes it means a login to Cision you never open. Ask which one you are buying. If the deliverable is a PDF on Tuesday of stories that posted Monday, you bought a recap, not a clip service.
From the mailroom to a ping
A clip is a URL, a date, a outlet name, and the sentence that mattered. AyeWatch will give you the URL and a short summary of why the topic matched. You still paste the outlet into your tracker if your boss wants a spreadsheet. That is dull and honest. The old envelope at least arrived as paper you could file. The new version only works if someone actually opens the alert.
Free Preview is six lifetime runs across three topics, Daily or slower, push and in-app. Treat it like a trial clip desk. Pro at $9 a month raises you to 50 topics and a 6-hour check. Pro+ is 150 and hourly. Email, Slack, Discord, webhooks, and API are paid, which is how a clip reaches the person who has to reply to the reporter.
What counts as a real outlet
Your definition, not a vendor's whitelist. For some teams, real means the trades their buyers read. For others, it is a Substack the national desk already quotes. For others, a podcast recap is the clip, because the audio never shows up in a print database. If that is you, add podcast mention monitoring beside the news topics.
AyeWatch does not certify outlets. It does not sell journalist phone numbers. Cision does. Meltwater has a press database AyeWatch does not. If you need those, stay on a Cision alternative that still ships contacts. Use AyeWatch for the public page that appeared while the database was still indexing.
Start a monitor in under a minute
Free Preview is six lifetime runs across three topics. No card.
Try AyeWatch freeBuilding a clip list without a database
Topic one: company name in news and industry blogs, skip press-release wires you already sent. Topic two: product name plus "review" or "first look." Topic three: a page you paste, the reporter who always posts early, or the forum your customers treat as a paper of record. Tighten after a week of junk affiliate posts.
Who still needs the old vendor
Anyone who must prove print coverage to a board, anyone who needs licensed archives, anyone whose RFP says "media database." That buyer is not AyeWatch. The buyer who used to get envelopes and now gets silence is. Start with one topic. If the first summary names the actual piece, you have a clip service again. If it does not, fix the brief before you add 49 more topics on Pro.