What Finally Worked: Breaking Down the Biggest Media Tracking Challenges
I’ve worked in comms for more than a decade. During that time I saw a consistent pattern emerging. It didn’t matter what sector I was working in, or with which team—I always ran into the same fundamental issues: Teams couldn’t hold onto institutional memory. We had no reliable way to track messaging over time. We didn’t know what was working until after the fact. And the tools we were using simply weren’t built for the job.
Everyone had their own patchwork system—spreadsheets, email chains, folders full of past statements. People swore by their processes, but when the pressure hit—a tough media request, a breaking story, a leadership ask—the systems buckled. Important details vanished. Messages conflicted. Time was wasted chasing things that should’ve been at our fingertips.
If that sounds familiar, I want to walk you through the four challenges I kept seeing, and what finally helped us move past them.
1. You lose context the moment someone leaves the team
This is the one that hits hardest. A senior communicator leaves the team, and suddenly a decade’s worth of insight walks out the door with them. There’s no documented history of journalist relationships. No notes on past interactions. No breadcrumbs to follow.
At one university I worked with, a longtime media lead retired, and we were left with almost no record of her work. We didn’t know what kind of relationship she had with a key national reporter, or why certain outlets had stopped reaching out. The silence was louder than any media hit—we’d lost our bearings.
2. There’s no dependable record of what’s been said before
At some point in nearly every media cycle, someone asks, “What did we say last time?” And too often, the answer is: “Let me check.”
Sometimes the quote is buried in an archived release. Sometimes it’s scribbled in a notebook. Sometimes, it was said off the cuff on a call and never written down at all. During one controversy, we were hit with three media inquiries in two days. We ended up giving slightly different responses to each one—not because we were being evasive, but because we simply didn’t have a consistent record of what had already gone out.
3. You’re always working in hindsight
I’ve lost count of the times I was asked to summarize how our media coverage was trending. And I wish I could say we had that data ready to go—but the reality was always a scramble.
We’d piece things together from news alerts, manual searches and memory. We’d try to guess at sentiment. And more than once, we found out we were in the news days after the fact—only because someone forwarded a story we hadn’t even seen.
4. Project management tools don’t manage external relationships
We tried customizing project management platforms. We created detailed boards, custom fields, workflows. It looked polished. But it didn’t solve the actual problems.
These tools are designed to move tasks from A to B. They’re not built to capture evolving relationships, track message consistency, or surface critical history on demand. You can’t see how many times you followed up with a journalist. You can’t filter by tone or topic. You can’t build trust with a reporter using a checklist.
We needed more than workflow—we needed shared awareness.
So what finally worked
For a while, I kept thinking we could make spreadsheets work. If we added the right columns, or color-coded them well enough, maybe it would finally click. But every time a request came in, we’d still be jumping between tabs, hunting through folders, trying to remember if someone had already followed up.
People suggested using project management tools instead. So we tried. We added tags. Built templates. Even created fields just for journalist engagement. But none of it ever felt quite right—we were constantly hacking the system, forcing it to do things it was never meant to handle.
Eventually, I reached out to a friend who builds software. We sat down one afternoon, and I unloaded everything—years of frustrations, the patterns I’d seen across dozens of teams, the kinds of features we needed but could never find.
That conversation became the starting point for Broadsight.
It wasn’t built overnight; we had many iterations and tweaks. But it finally gave us what we needed: a system designed for how media teams actually work!
Now we have a single, living record of media activity. We can see every quote we’ve given, every request we’ve received, every relationship we’re managing. We can track sentiment over time. We can see what’s resonating. And when someone new joins the team, we don’t have to start from scratch—they can pick up where the last person left off.
It didn’t change our work—it supported it. It brought structure to the chaos without slowing us down. It made us more consistent, more prepared, and more confident in how we communicate.
Most importantly, it made the work sustainable. Because comms will always be fast-moving. But with the right foundation, it doesn’t have to be fragile.
If you’re in a similar place, I’d be happy to show you what we’ve built—and how it’s helping us do the work better! Head over to broadsight.ca and we can set up a call to walk you through it!
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