Victoria’s 79 local councils collectively serve over 6.5 million residents, yet most lack the resources to systematically track how their communities, projects, and policies are represented in the media. A council’s communications team might catch the front page of their local paper, but miss the regional radio segment, the online news aggregator, or the social media conversation that shapes public perception far more than print ever could.
Stromy developed a media intelligence platform purpose-built for the local government sector. The system monitors print, digital, broadcast, and social media sources across all 79 Victorian councils, tagging coverage by council, topic, sentiment, and reach. Rather than delivering a firehose of clippings, the platform uses AI to distil thousands of daily mentions into actionable summaries: which councils are trending and why, how coverage of a particular issue is evolving, and where narrative gaps present an opportunity for proactive communications.
The platform also enables cross-council benchmarking. A council dealing with community backlash over a planning decision can instantly see how peer councils navigated similar media cycles, what messaging resonated, and what fell flat. This kind of comparative intelligence was previously impossible at the local government level — it required the budgets and teams that only state or federal departments could afford.
Since launching, the platform has processed over 2.4 million data points across the 79 councils. Communications teams report spending significantly less time on manual media monitoring and more time on strategic response. Several councils have credited the platform with helping them identify and address reputational risks before they escalated, turning what was once a reactive function into a genuinely proactive capability.