Alex over at The Bivings Report must be a mindreader. I’d been mentally putting together a post about how an organisation or individual could use a range of free social media tools to monitor online news and coverage.
But Alex has beaten me to it. The post sets out how to use free tools to aggregate, present and search your selected coverage. Great stuff.
David Phillips at Leverwealth has spotted my post about blog feeders, which work along the same lines, and has helpfully pointed out that Google Reader can be used for this kind of thing as well.
David is spot on when he notes:

If you can’t monitor news, blogs and web sites these days you will be at least 20 hours behind the news so I do it and I expect every PR practitioner does it as well.

The game has changed and is now much faster than ever before. News clippings being faxed the next morning are virtually out-of-date as we now need to be monitoring in real time – and the good news is that this isn’t difficult to start doing.