News monitoring automation: get articles that mention your company as soon as they are published

A system that automatically collects articles mentioning your company or competitors and sends you alerts is straightforward to build. Daily manual searches are no longer needed, and new coverage reaches the person in charge as soon as it is published.

First choice: register, subscribe, or build

Option	Cost	Trade-off
Register for portal or search engine alerts	None	Limited to what that service indexes
Subscribe to a monitoring service	Monthly fee	Limited to the items and formats the vendor offers
Build your own	Development time and ongoing maintenance	You are responsible for fixing failures

The deciding factor is coverage. If portal search covers everything you need, alerts are enough. If a vendor already covers your sources, subscribing is faster. If neither applies, for example when you track specific trade publications, agency notices, or overseas media, building your own is the right choice.

The four decisions below apply if you choose to build.

① What to collect

• Use keyword sets. Register product names, competitor names, and industry terms along with the company name.
• Remove duplicates at collection. Many Korean news outlets have syndication agreements with news agencies, so the same story appears in several outlets at once. Without merging by a unique identifier, one story becomes ten alerts.
• Document the source scope. When the scope is written down, you can tell whether a missing article is a fault or a design decision.

② How to send: 알림톡 requirements

Alerts sent via KakaoTalk use 알림톡. Not every message is allowed: only approved templates can be sent, and review takes up to 2 business days.

Approval depends on whose purpose the message serves. Kakao’s guide states that “notices sent intermittently for the sender’s own purposes” are not allowed. A response to something the recipient requested is treated as an informational message.

The system is therefore designed so that alerts go only to people who registered keywords, and the template states that the alert relates to a keyword the recipient registered. That one line is the difference between a broadcast notice and a requested alert. A design that sends to a mailing list in bulk will not pass review.

SMS fallback is also set up in case delivery fails.

Order matters: finalize the template wording and the consent structure before development.

This is where in-house projects usually lose time. Collection takes only a few days, but a rejected template means redesigning the structure, and the reason for rejection is often a single line of text. Contact us about your alert channel, and we will review it and propose a format that passes.

③ How often to send

If alerts come too often, people start ignoring them, and the automation loses its value.

Set the collection interval and the sending interval separately. Collect frequently, but send in batches. Urgent keywords and reference keywords do not need the same schedule.

④ How to know when it stops

The most dangerous failure is a silent one. When a target site changes its structure or a credential expires, collection stops but the screen looks normal. Because no alerts look the same as no news, the problem is often found only days later.

This is why a dashboard is built alongside the system. With collection trends by keyword, share by source, and recently collected articles on one screen, you know the same day.

Being set up and delivering alerts are not the same. Delivery is what you need to check.

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Tell us two or three keywords you search for now.

There is no need to prepare a full list. Share what you do not want to miss, and we will check which sources can be covered and where alerts can be sent.

→ Contact us about monitoring · See our work

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References

• kakao business 알림톡 review guide [verified: only approved templates can be sent · review within 2 business days · notices for the sender’s own purposes not allowed]
• Naver Developers Search API (news) [verified: called with a Client ID and Secret after registering an application]

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Pricing by collection scale and difficulty: Data collection pricing