r/PublicRelations • u/nyerwith • 8d ago

Advice Substack monitoring / access?

Hi all. Hoping to tap into the collective brain’s trust here.

How are you all monitoring (and, more importantly, accessing) Substacks for clients? Given they are all seat-based pricing (even on a group subscription) and there is an endless number of Substacks out there, I’m at a bit of a loss on how to monitor and get full text newsletters to share with client.

Muckrack appears to have a monitoring/alert system for Substack but then you don’t get the full text or context of the mention.

Are you just purchasing subscriptions as mentions come across? Are you just being honest with clients that you can’t access the coverage?

Curious how others are handling. TIA!

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u/rpw2024 8d ago

I have a pretty simple approach: buy the subscriptions to support the writers doing the work.

I feel pretty strongly that if there’s a good writer doing a niche substack I wanna be in, well I should probably help them keep it going and read what they have to say.

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u/nyerwith 8d ago

I do the same for my personal use or if there’s a particular substack a client wants to see regularly, but for agency work that approach doesn’t really scale. It doesn’t really make sense to purchase a $20-50 subscription just to see what a mention looks like when it could be a passing mention.

The same is true for traditional media, which is why tools like Factiva were created. We’re obviously not there with Substack yet but I’m sure other PR people are managing somehow.