Glossary
The marketing news glossary
The words marketing, PR and product marketing teams use for news, monitoring and competitive intelligence, each defined in a sentence or two.
Battlecard
A battlecard is a one-page brief that tells a sales team how to win against a specific competitor: what they claim, where they're weak, and what to say. It goes stale fast, so product marketers update it whenever the competitor launches, reprices or makes the news.
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Boolean search
A boolean search combines keywords with AND, OR and NOT to tell a monitoring tool what to find. It's precise but slow to write and easy to get wrong, which is why many teams miss stories that use words they didn't think of.
Brand monitoring
Brand monitoring is tracking where and how your company, products and people are mentioned in news, social media and reviews. Its job is to catch praise, complaints and problems early enough to respond.
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Competitive intelligence
Competitive intelligence is gathering and analyzing what competitors do, from launches and pricing to hiring and partnerships, so a company can make better decisions. Most of it comes from public sources such as news, newsrooms, filings and websites.
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Competitor monitoring
Competitor monitoring is the ongoing, day-to-day part of competitive intelligence: watching named competitors for news, announcements and changes as they happen, rather than researching them once a quarter.
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Content calendar
A content calendar is a schedule of what a team will publish, where and when. Good calendars leave room for timely pieces that react to the week's news, alongside the planned ones.
Crisis communications
Crisis communications is how a company prepares for and responds to events that threaten its reputation, such as a breach, a recall or a damaging story. Speed matters most: the first hours decide whose version people hear.
Earned media
Earned media is coverage a company gets without paying for it: news stories, reviews, interviews and mentions. It's the counterpart to paid media (ads) and owned media (your own site, email and social accounts).
Embargo
An embargo is an agreement that a journalist won't publish news shared in advance until a set date and time. It gives reporters time to prepare and lets a company control when an announcement goes public.
Executive briefing
An executive briefing is a short summary of the news and developments leaders need to know, usually delivered every morning. The best ones say why each item matters and what, if anything, to do about it.
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Market intelligence
Market intelligence is information about a company's whole market: customers, regulation, trends and competitors together. Competitive intelligence is one part of it.
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MCP (Model Context Protocol)
MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is an open standard that lets AI assistants connect to outside tools and data. An assistant that supports MCP can add a news source like nwsppr as a connector and read from it when you ask.
More: nwsppr for AI assistants
Media list
A media list is a set of journalists, editors and outlets a PR team pitches, with their beats and contact details. Reading what each reporter has covered recently is what keeps a list useful.
Media monitoring
Media monitoring is tracking news, broadcast, online and social coverage for mentions of a company, its competitors or its topics. PR and comms teams use it to measure coverage and to spot stories they need to respond to.
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News aggregator
A news aggregator collects stories from many sources into one place. Most show everything that matches; a curated one also ranks and filters, so you read the few stories that matter instead of the whole feed.
News alert
A news alert is a notification sent when a new story matches a keyword or topic. Alerts are fast but noisy: they fire on every passing mention, so the important story arrives buried among the rest.
News cycle
The news cycle is the time from when a story breaks to when attention moves on, often a day or less online. Teams that want to comment on a story have to do it inside that window.
Newsjacking
Newsjacking is adding your company's point of view to a story while it's in the news, through a comment, a post or a pitch to reporters. It works when the angle is genuinely useful and the timing is early.
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Press release
A press release is an official announcement a company publishes for journalists and the public, usually through its newsroom and a wire service. Competitors' releases are one of the fastest signals of what they're doing next.
Rapid response
Rapid response is a team's plan for reacting to news within hours: who decides, who writes, and who approves. It turns a story about a competitor, a customer or a new rule into a timely post, pitch or note to sales.
Sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis classifies coverage or posts as positive, negative or neutral, usually automatically. It's a quick read on tone across many mentions, but it misses sarcasm and context, so the important stories still need a human read.
Thought leadership
Thought leadership is content in which a company's experts share a distinct, useful point of view on their industry. Commentary on current news is one of the fastest ways to build it.
Trade press
Trade press is publications that cover one industry for the people who work in it. They often report product, pricing and regulatory news before general outlets do, which makes them the first place to watch.
Voice of the customer
Voice of the customer is what customers say they need, like and dislike, gathered from interviews, reviews, support tickets and surveys. News about customers' own industries is useful context for it.
Win-loss analysis
Win-loss analysis is studying why deals were won or lost, usually by interviewing buyers. Combined with competitor news, it shows which competitor moves actually change buying decisions.
Social listening
Social listening is tracking and analyzing what people say on social platforms about a brand, competitors or topics. Media monitoring focuses on published coverage; social listening focuses on public conversation.
More: Media monitoring vs social listening