Measuring PR success by column inches is old hat – welcome to a new analysis

So where to pitch a story? The increasingly sophisticated science of tracking and monitoring media coverage has decreed that the Edinburgh Evening News, closely followed by the Daily Star, is the news outlet most likely to run a favourable article.

And in spite of the rottweiler reputation of John Humphrys, BBC Radio 4 comes next, ahead of the Aberdeen Press & Journal, The Scotsman and the Daily Record, an indication, perhaps, that Scottish journalists are less hostile than others in the British media.

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At the other end of the scale are the International Herald Tribune, the Norfolk-based Eastern Daily Press, the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times, as the titles most likely to run a hostile piece.

At least this is the claim of a Media Evaluation & PR Benchmarking Report by Metrica, an exercise that reflects the increasing sophistication of the public relations industry in tracking the impact of its collective efforts. Based on the experiences of 700 organisations, ranging from public bodies to charities and financial companies, it is an analysis of more than three million press articles and items of broadcast news from the past decade.

It finds that newspapers such as The Sun, the Daily Mirror and the Daily Express are more likely to take a positive angle than quality titles such as The Independent and the Financial Times. It also reports that, contrary to notions that some chief executives might have, the overwhelming majority of coverage is positive. In daily national newspapers, 90 per cent of articles are designated "favourable" to the organisation mentioned, rising to 97 per cent for items on local radio and local television stations. On average, a UK organisation will enjoy 492 mentions across national and regional media in a typical month, reaching an audience of 16.6 million (35 per cent of the population). Metrica judges less than 8 per cent of all coverage to be "strongly unfavourable".

The report states that: "This empirical evidence flies in the face of general anecdotal feeling that the media tends to promote more "sensationalist" coverage which by its nature is more likely to be negative".

This is not to say that the news media is being tamed – the proportion of "unfavourable coverage" has doubled from 4.3 per cent in 2001 to 7.8 per cent in 2007 – a trend that Metrica assigns to "the increasing competitiveness of the media in the last few years".

What is clear is that the PR industry's impact is huge, with no less than 42 per cent of articles conveying a "key message" from the organisation featured.

The picture is not uniform and some clients will inevitably represent a greater challenge to their PRs than others. The financial sector (15 per cent of stories unfavourable) had a disproportionately bad press in 2007, partly due to the deteriorating economic environment. Technology and telecoms companies find it most difficult to translate their "key messages" into stories that PRs can pitch to journalists.

But the growth of online news has led to a trend that Metrica terms "Haste and Paste", where time-poor websites will automatically publish an organisation's message and a quote from its spokesperson. "High message delivery and spokespeople mentions suggest the emergence of a copy and paste publishing trend in online media," says the report.

The analytical approach of Metrica, and other companies such as Echo Research, Media Measurement Limited, Media Evaluation Research and Precise Media, is challenging the traditional PR measure of advertising value equivalent (AVE), which compared a piece of editorial to the cost of a similarly-sized advertisement.

Claire O'Sullivan, Metrica's associate director, says: "Using an AVE to measure how effective PR has been is like using a thermometer to measure speed – it's the wrong tool. The appropriate way to measure PR is to assemble a dashboard of measures relevant to an organisation's communications objectives – for example, which key messages are reaching which audience and how many times."