Actions to balance the risks of adverse-media monitoring and web scraping for news content
Jinfo Blog

By Stephen Phillips

Abstract

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The evolving technological landscape – marked by the rapid deployment of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) to offer web scraping – presents a complex trade-off between comprehensive coverage, data integrity and copyright risk.

For organisations exploring GenAI to power their news-gathering and summarisation, a key emerging use-case is adverse-media monitoring.

But is this technology best suited to this vital function?

Adverse-media monitoring is driven by the critical need to mitigate the reputational and relationship damage associated with competitors, third-parties and regulatory compliance.

Information managers must assume the role of strategic advisors, balancing risk with commercial acumen, by resolving two core challenges:

1. The Coverage Dilemma:
   
   71% of contributors to our survey prefer traditional licensed sources for media monitoring. But these products lack the breadth to capture local, timely information. This exposes organisations to potential risk.
   
   
2. The Quality Crisis:
   
   A recent study revealed that 45% of GenAI responses had serious sourcing and accuracy flaws. And overall, 81% of GenAI responses examined in this study had some kind of issue.
   
   Our own survey found that 41% of respondents demand highly accurate search results, with low (or no) false positives from their media monitoring tools.

This discrepancy indicates that GenAI is not yet ready to use for adverse-media monitoring.

Two contributors observed:

"The time spent (on adverse-media monitoring) is disproportionate to the outcomes"

"It's a time-consuming exercise when time is limited!"

The full Jinfo report provides practical strategies and actions for information managers, research heads, and content buyers, to:

• realign risk tolerance
• enforce rigorous verification processes
• position the information function as the authoritative guide for quality, high-stakes business intelligence.

Read the report "Optimising licensed content, web scraping and GenAI for adverse-media monitoring".

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