Any ideas for a "media hits" or "in the news" page?

[Doug Thompson]

Right now, we have a dense "OWU in the Media" page on our site:

http://news.owu.edu/OWUInTheNews.php

This is a not-so-great-but-it-worked-so-we-stuck-with-it implementation involving monthly CSV files (generated from our media hit service, Meltwater) that contain information (headline, link, date, publication, etc.) about each media hit.

The CSV-parsing and whatnot are very barebones, basic PHP commands. Nothing fancy at all.

It works, but the page gets staggeringly long due to the number of hits and, as such, takes longer and longer to process each time we add another CSV.

Has anyone else put together (or seen) this sort of thing done in a more...elegant...way? Or, even better, is there some sort of system (open source or otherwise) out there that does this type of thing but is more automatic/filterable/searchable/etc.?

Thanks in advance for any help anyone can provide on this,

Doug Thompson
Manager of Web and Electronic Communications
Ohio Wesleyan University
[e-mail]

[Lane Joplin]

You guys get a lot of media attention. We have a page http://www.uat.edu/press that we use. I have to go in and manually put in the stories. Both for our Press Releases (on the left) and our Media mentions (one the right). We know it needs an overhaul, but it has to suffice for the time being.

Wish I could help more.

[J.D. Ross]

Our news system is tag-based, so when we write a news story about media coverage we've received, we tag it as "In the News" and then link to search results for this tag: http://bit.ly/bNd3nY

It's not automatic, but that's good, as it allows us to address the media coverage on our own terms, and decide what we want to highlight.

[Georgiana Cohen]

We built an application for this -- http://news.tufts.edu/clips/ -- where the PR office adds the headline, link, summary, date, and source for a hit. This dovetails with work they already do for an internal, daily e-mail compendium of press coverage. I believe the app was built using the Cymfony PHP framework.

Each clip has its own landing page -- http://news.tufts.edu/clips/?id=302 -- so we can link to the press hit from the homepage and elsewhere without throwing people into NYTimes.com right off the bat.

We only archive back two weeks, since links expire or change.

In our new news system that we are building, we might add more metadata to this. Right now, it is what it is.