When filtering results by Source Type within Explore, almost all sources offer an all-or-nothing option. Select X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit to include only their results, or make no selection and include all results.

News, however, allows you to filter within our News database by Source and Criteria. This allows you to include or exclude content from specific news sources or article reach values.

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News is copyrighted content from news sources such as The New York Times, BBC, CNN, local newspapers, and online journals. Content posted on television networks' websites is also classified as News. Meltwater crawls and archives over 3 million traditional media articles a day through its news sources.

News is an option under the Source type filter within Explore.

Clicking the arrow beside the number of results for News opens a new filter that allows you to filter your News results by Source and Criteria.

Filtering News by source allows you to search for specific sources by name or URL. You then have the option to either include or exclude results from that source. You may select multiple sources. You can paste up to 2,000 URLs at a time - quickly copy/paste your comma-separated list of URLs to search all sites at once.

Example Use Case: Looking for local covid coverage. Since covid is global, it will be difficult to look at all news. Use By Source filtering to select small, local newspapers (i.e. The News and Observer) and exclude large, national and international newspapers (i.e. The New York Times).

In 2023, when the Outlet Type filter was introduced, it was a way to include or exclude new media results by specific categories. These filters worked at the publisher level, classifying outlets according to the type of news media they mainly publish (ex. Marketwatch.com and all its published content fall in the Stock Market News category).

This led to discrepancies with three of the outlet types, specifically: Press Release Wires, Market Research Report Announcements, and Stock Market News.

Previously, outlets with mixed article types (e.g., CNN) were excluded from these filters. Now, the filters are applied to each article, providing more accuracy and control over your results

Note: This will not impact your search if you have used the outlet type filters in the past.

Note: When you apply the filters, the number of documents matching your search and reach metrics might drop significantly (see FAQs for more details).

Filter news results based on the sources' license types. Non-premium news sources are available to all Meltwater customers. Premium licenses require an additional subscription for full content access.

Filtering news by reach allows you to filter results from sources that fall into the specific reach percentage ranges. Global News sources will have larger reach values than small, local news sources.

Example Use Case: Looking for news articles mentioning my company from the top news sources globally. Select Top ten % to only include results from sources with top 10% reach.

What’s the difference between these new category filters and the outlet type filters that were introduced in 2023?

Within the outlet types subfilter, the classification happens at the source/outlet level, not at the individual document level (meaning, the article level). This means that if a source publishes content that falls into multiple categories, e.g. PR wire distributions alongside editorial articles, then the source itself will be categorized as “general news”. The new filter categories enable an article-level categorization for higher accuracy.

Backfill - How far back does the new categorization go?

News articles and blog posts published after Jan 1, 2023 will reflect the new document categorization.

Why should I use the filters instead of a Boolean Custom Category like in the past?

There are several advantages of switching to the updated filters including:

I have selected all categories except for the press release wires, but I still see some PR wires coming through. Why is that?

A document can fall into more than one category. So if the articles that you see are matching the criteria for PR wire and also for market research report announcements or stock market news, then those will still show up in the search results since you are including these categories in your selection.

If you wish to exclude all documents from one category no matter whether they match a different category as well, you can also use the Boolean versions of the categories from this article and add them as a NOT to your search.

The number of documents decreased significantly after applying these filters, why is that?

When you apply the filters, the number of documents matching your search and reach metrics might drop significantly.

Note that for certain companies, the volume for each of these categories can be quite high and excluding them can result in a reduction of news coverage by more than 50-70%. The main reason for this big impact lies in the nature of these documents: a single release shared via a press release wire or a market research report announcements usually sees 100-150 syndications that are picked up by our crawlers. So ten press releases that mention the brand, can result in 1-1.5k documents that would be filtered out when using the new categories. For stock market news, we observe something similar due to regular updates and announcements on stock developments.

If you’re surprised or uncomfortable with the decrease of the coverage numbers and uncertain of whether the noise filters are the best way to go about excluding noise, we recommend running a counter-test by including a category to see examples of the coverage that would be excluded with the filter. In most cases, feedback confirms that these are indeed articles that should not be counted toward media analysis.

What if I still see stock market news? Is this intended?

These filters are conservative regarding filtering out stock market news. The type of stock market news you might still see pertains to unlisted companies and their press releases, including both statements and financial information such as revenue and more. If you want to remove all articles mentioning financial details, we recommend using the Stock Market News filter together with a custom category.

What if I want to keep the old outlet type filters?

There is a workaround to keep the outlet type filters by adding any of the below statements in your Boolean. Please be aware that these are not as accurate as the new document categories.

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