The Challenge
Victoria’s 79 local councils operate across vastly different contexts — from inner-Melbourne municipalities managing dense urban issues to rural shires covering thousands of square kilometres. Despite this diversity, they share a common problem: understanding how their communities, projects, and decisions are represented in the media. Most councils relied on manual clipping services or ad hoc Google Alerts, which missed broadcast coverage entirely, delivered results with a 24-48 hour lag, and provided no analytical layer to distinguish a passing mention from a sustained narrative.
The sector needed a solution that could scale across all 79 councils without requiring each one to build its own monitoring capability. It also needed to handle the full spectrum of media — print, digital, broadcast, and social — and deliver insights that communications teams could act on immediately.
Our Approach
We built a media intelligence platform specifically designed for the local government sector. The system continuously monitors over 1,200 media sources across Victoria, including local newspapers, regional radio stations, online news outlets, and social media platforms. Each mention is automatically tagged by council, topic, sentiment, and estimated reach.
Rather than delivering raw clippings, the platform uses AI to generate daily briefings for each council, highlighting the coverage that matters most. A negative story gaining traction receives a higher priority than a routine council meeting report. The system also identifies cross-council patterns — when an issue like rate increases or planning disputes is generating coverage across multiple municipalities simultaneously, it flags the trend and provides comparative context.
We worked closely with council communications teams during development, iterating on the briefing format, the topic taxonomy, and the alert thresholds to ensure the platform fit naturally into existing workflows.
The Outcome
Communications teams across the 79 councils now start each day with a clear picture of their media landscape. The average time from publication to insight dropped from over 24 hours to under 4 hours, with critical stories flagged in near real-time. Teams report reclaiming significant hours each week that were previously spent on manual monitoring, redirecting that time toward proactive media engagement and strategic communications planning.
The cross-council benchmarking capability proved unexpectedly valuable. When one council faced sustained negative coverage over a contentious development application, its communications team was able to review how three peer councils had successfully navigated similar media cycles in the preceding months. The platform surfaced the messaging strategies that resonated, the spokespeople who were most effective, and the timeline over which coverage typically subsided.
Key Metrics
The numbers tell a clear story of scale and impact. Over 2.4 million individual data points have been processed since launch, spanning every council in the state. The platform monitors media around the clock, ensuring that early-morning radio segments and late-evening online publications are captured with the same reliability as daytime print editions. Council communications teams consistently report that the platform has shifted their function from reactive monitoring to proactive media management.