Cut it Out

It's not so long ago that media monitoring was a pure commodity business. Serried ranks of sharp-eyed youngsters would clip newspaper reports about company X or Y; photocopy the relevant extracts and stick them onto sheets of paper, together with the names and dates of the papers or journals from which they came; then pass them to someone else for delivery to the client. More often than not, that client was a public relations firm. And the purpose of the whole laborious exercise was to prove