Press clipping: Definition, contents and sources

The word comes from cutting articles out of newspapers. Clipping bureaus have done this since the late 19th century. Today most clippings are digital: a PDF, a screenshot, a link to an online article or a segment from a broadcast. In British English you will also hear "press cutting". For PR teams the clipping is the basic unit of coverage reporting: press reviews and clipping reports are built from clippings. Broader PR evaluation also draws on surveys and other evidence.

What a clipping record contains

A clipping is more than the article. To be useful later, it needs metadata. A typical record holds:

• Outlet and section, such as a daily newspaper, a trade site or a podcast.
• Publication date.
• Author of the piece.
• Channel: print, online, TV, radio, podcast or social media.
• Reach: an audience proxy with a stated unit, source and period, such as circulation in copies for print, or visits or page views for online. Visits and page views are not unique people, and traffic for a whole outlet is not the readership of one article.
• Sentiment: whether the coverage is positive, neutral or negative about you.
• Content: a scan, facsimile, transcript or link to the original.

Many teams add their own fields: the project or campaign, the topic, which spokespeople are quoted, whether a key message appears, or whether the piece came from a press release.

Example clipping record

Here is what a fully recorded clipping might look like. The example is made up.

Fields like these let you filter, count and compare later. A folder of PDFs without them does not.

Be careful when adding up reach: summing it across clippings counts people who see several pieces more than once. The Institute for Public Relations also warns that suppliers often provide generalised audience numbers that can be highly inflated, such as monthly visitors to a whole site instead of the readership of one article.

Where clippings come from

Clippings come from every media type:

• Print: newspapers and magazines, as scans or digital facsimiles.
• Online: news sites, trade media and blogs.
• TV and radio: recordings or transcripts of individual segments.
• Podcasts: episodes that mention you, often with a timestamp.
• Social media: posts on platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram or X.

Audio and video are often transcribed so they can be searched and analysed like text.

Clipping services vs. tools

Traditionally, organisations hired a clipping service. It read the media for agreed search terms and delivered the matches, once by post, now digitally. There is also software that lets teams set up their own searches, review results and manage clippings themselves. Many organisations combine the two: monitoring delivers matches, and the team adds coverage it found itself or received from journalists. For an overview of providers, see our guide to the best media monitoring tools.

Copyright still applies. Press articles are generally protected, and copying or sharing them needs permission. Even short extracts can be protected: in Infopaq (C-5/08), the Court of Justice of the EU held that an extract of 11 words can qualify if it expresses the author's own intellectual creation. In the UK, businesses generally need permission or an applicable licence to copy newspaper and magazine content for internal use, for example from NLA Media Access for the titles it represents, and agencies that supply such content to clients need a different licence. The press review entry covers the German rules.

How clippings feed press reviews and reporting

Clippings are the raw material for three formats:

1. A press review collects them and circulates them regularly so everyone knows what was published.
2. A PR report summarises them for a period, such as a month or a campaign, with figures for volume, reach and sentiment.
3. A media content analysis evaluates them systematically, for example by topic, message and share of voice against competitors.

The AMEC evaluation taxonomy lists metrics such as publicity volume, media reach, share of voice and tone as outputs. Clippings show what was published. They do not show whether the audience changed its mind. Attitude change needs surveys or comparable audience research. Website traffic is behavioural data: it shows that people visited, not what they now think. For a look at how PR teams build clipping reports in practice, see our survey of more than 1,000 PR professionals.

Clippings in aclipp

aclipp collects clippings through global online monitoring across more than 150 million sources. Coverage you find yourself can be imported as a link or file. aclipp adds details such as outlet, date, channel, reach and sentiment, which you can review and correct. The clippings then go into press reviews and reports. Read more about media monitoring.