Newsrooms mostly used the Approval River as a way to track mentions of their work by influencers on social media or by other publications. Some newsrooms leveraged Twitter Lists to a large degree. They set up recipes with their domain name on “Presidents-HeadsOfGovt,”56government officials,57attorneys.58once a week and categorize possible hits.
IEs also used Google Alerts recipes to look for pickups of their stories by other organizations or mentions of their founders or board of directors. We weren’t able to completely replace existing workflows, however. One challenge we faced was that some clipping services changed during the development of the platform, and we didn’t have the time to fully implement new service recipes. For example, according to some IEs, the quality of Google Alerts has decreased in recent months and their organizations now use other clipping services to track mentions. We discuss improvements to this problem of shifting technologies in the chapter Future Paths for NewsLynx.
In terms of affecting efficiency, participant newsrooms reported that it helped streamline their clip-search tasks and, in the case of Twitter List searches, helped them surface elements they wouldn’t have otherwise seen.