Cision / 2024-2026
How did the story land?
A brand can appear in a lot of places without the same story landing in all of them. At Cision, I looked past the total to understand what travelled, where it travelled, and what the coverage actually said.
Reading the reports
Media intelligence01 / Observation
More coverage.
Not always
more impact.
Volume and potential audience answer different questions.
The reading behind the report02 / Interpretation
- 01
Follow the movement.
Compare markets, topics and the previous period.
- 02
Read what travelled.
Find the source stories behind volume and reach.
- 03
Keep the distinction.
Visibility is not the same as audience response.
The interesting thing is usually underneath.
Different brands. Different questions.
My reporting portfolio included Coca-Cola, the LEGO Group and Skyscanner, alongside motorsport and health & wellbeing. The questions changed with the brand and the brief: reputation, message delivery, product visibility, markets or competitor coverage.
The common thread was interpretation. A report needed to explain the change, not simply describe the shape of the chart.
The reading before the report.
I read and coded coverage, checked the data, compared periods and topics, and followed the source stories behind a change. In travel reporting, that included looking at market differences, potential audience, product mentions and competitor coverage.
Sometimes a story appeared in more places without reaching a larger potential audience. That distinction mattered. More coverage did not automatically mean more attention, and neither figure was evidence of more sales.
Keep the tone in context.
For reputation work, I looked at message delivery, topic movement and tone. Human-coded news coverage and automated social sentiment were kept distinct rather than treated as interchangeable measures.
A number was the beginning of the explanation. The language, sources and stories around it helped establish what we could reasonably say.
My part in it.
My contribution was the reading, coding, checking and interpretation, and then the writing that made it usable. I wanted someone opening the report to understand what drove the change and where to look next.
The work sharpened a habit I still use: make the smallest useful claim the evidence can support. A clear explanation is worth more than a confident sentence that goes too far.