INTRODUCING
Above the Fold is Muck Rack’s new quarterly product event, highlighting the innovations we’re most excited to share. More than a list of updates, it’s a look at where Muck Rack is headed and how we’re evolving to meet the changing needs of communications teams.
By Shane Ham, Lead Product Manager
Muck Rack can now uncover emerging stories and recommend where your organization can add a valuable perspective.
Every communications team begins the day with two critical questions: What is being said about our organization, and what should we be paying attention to now?
The first is a question of brand monitoring. The second requires a broader understanding of the conversations shaping your reputation, your industry, and your opportunity to lead. Until now, answering them has required two separate workflows.
Newsjacking Opportunities brings them together.
Muck Rack's Newsjacking feature analyzes the broader news cycle through the lens of your Curation Engine configuration, identifying developing stories, emerging industry conversations, and timely opportunities for your organization to contribute, without your brand having been mentioned.
Each recommendation explains why a story is relevant and suggests an angle your team can take. You might pitch a journalist, offer an expert perspective, prepare stakeholders, or continue monitoring the conversation. Your team remains in control. Newsjacking Opportunities provides the intelligence needed to make the decision while there is still time to act.
Newsjacking Opportunities offers a glimpse into Agentic Muck Rack. It's more than just another AI capability. It reflects a year spent reengineering media monitoring around a more consequential challenge. While others taught AI to summarize what has already happened, we taught it to identify what happens next.
By Brian Maehl, Senior Director of Product
Traditional media monitoring asks communicators to define relevance through keywords and Boolean searches, then invest serious time cleaning up the results. We recognized that building another agent to create a Boolean search wasn’t going to fully solve the problem, so we took a different approach. Instead of asking people to organize coverage after it’s collected, we built AI that understands it first.
With Curation Engine, every article is evaluated before it reaches your team. AI trained and refined by Muck Rack’s Media Intelligence team determines whether coverage is relevant, identifies the brands, competitors and spokespeople involved, measures entity-level sentiment and prominence, and automatically applies the topics and tags that matter to your organization. The result is coverage that’s already structured, organized and ready for analysis - the trusted data foundation an agentic Muck Rack requires.
Instead of creating a separate report for every competitor or executive, Multi-Subject Monitoring evaluates your brand and competitors within the same articles, with independent sentiment and prominence for each. AI Summaries explain what happened and why it matters without requiring you to read every article. Even Alerts become more meaningful because they’re filtered by subject, sentiment, prominence and tags, not just keywords.
All of that intelligence comes together in Coverage Hub, the jumping-off point for agents to help you execute what comes next. Rather than leaving you to decide which report to build or search to run, an agentic workflow helps move you from insight to action. Coverage Analyst digs into your data and answers questions in your own words, from within Muck Rack or in your preferred AI tools via the MCP. Discover Journalists helps identify the right journalists to engage, and Newsjacking surfaces timely opportunities to contribute to the narrative.
This is Agentic Muck Rack in practice: agents grounded in trusted media data, helping you understand what matters and take the next step. Now, the promise of proactive PR is becoming real.
NEW FEATURES BREAKDOWN
Monitor for relevance, not boolean keywords
Curation Engine uses AI to evaluate every piece of online, print and broadcast coverage to determine if the coverage is truly relevant to your organization. From there, it assesses entity-level sentiment and brand prominence in the article.
What it unlocks: Accurate reporting you trust to share with your team and inform your decisions. Tailored newsjacking opportunities that fit your spokespeople and profile.
Segment coverage by brand and competitors
Track your brand and competitors together in a single Coverage Report. Curation Engine analyzes each subject independently, making it easy to compare without managing multiple reports.
What it unlocks: Complete competitive landscapes in one place, instead of stitching together multiple reports.
Tag coverage based on themes, spokespeople and more
Apply tags based on campaigns, spokespeople, issues, products and any other categories that matter to your team. Tags can be automatically applied to trackers, or on specific pieces of coverage in Curation Engine.
What it unlocks: A clean and automated way to organize, filter, and analyze coverage across teams.
See the mention's context in seconds
Get AI-powered summaries focused on what matters to you, not generic recaps of the entire article. See the key themes, people and organizations relevant to your priorities, while Coverage Spike summaries explain what’s driving changes in your media over time.
What it unlocks: The context you need, without reading every article or transcript.
Filter alerts based on sentiment and prominence
Control which coverage reaches your inbox or Slack by filtering alerts based on sentiment, prominence and tags.
What it unlocks: Tailored alerts that help the right teams see the coverage they need to act on, without sorting through irrelevant mentions.
Turn real search behavior into prompts worth tracking
Instead of staring at a blank screen and guessing what people might search for, Muck Rack surfaces real search data to help you identify the themes and questions your audience cares about. It then recommends the most relevant prompts to monitor, giving you a data-backed starting point that you can review and refine.
What it unlocks: Prompts based on what your audience is actually searching for, not assumptions.
Bringing more trusted journalism into Muck Rack
New partnerships with Bloomberg Media, STAT and MIT Technology Review deepen coverage across business, healthcare, life sciences and emerging technology. Together, they expand a global network already spanning more than 1 million sources.
What it unlocks: Capture more of the coverage that matters, all in one place.
Tailored international coverage for global organizations
For organizations with global monitoring needs, international print coverage is available as an add-on through Curation Engine and Media Intelligence. Our team tailors coverage to the markets and keywords that matter most, with access to leading print publications such as El País, The Times of India, South China Morning Post, Le Monde and Der Spiegel.
What it unlocks: Relevant print coverage everywhere your organization operates, without juggling multiple platforms or providers.
One place to understand your narrative
Brings monitoring, analytics and AI together in a single workspace. Review coverage, explore trends, compare competitors and discover opportunities without jumping between reports and dashboards.
What it unlocks: Less time spent navigating through separate tools and more time understanding what's shaping your narrative.
Ask in your own words in Muck Rack or via MCP
Ask questions about your coverage in your own words, and get answers grounded in your Coverage Hub data. Coverage Analyst explains trends, uncovers patterns and highlights changes. MCP support lets you access the same insights from the AI tools your team already uses.
What it unlocks: The exact answers and insights you need, without building reports from scratch.
Review coverage with richer context
Surface AI summaries, sentiment, prominence and other key details in your feed, making it easier to evaluate what's important at a glance.
What it unlocks: identifying stories that deserve your attention while reviewing more coverage in less time.
Turn your data into visual insight
Visualize your coverage with flexible dashboards. Compare share of voice, subject-level sentiment, top tags and trends, then filter by language, location, media type and subjects.
What it unlocks: Moving beyond metrics to understand how your narrative is evolving and what's driving change.
Executive-ready reporting, always in sync
Create presentations directly from your Coverage Hub analytics and keep them automatically synchronized as your reports change. Your presentations always reflect the latest insights without rebuilding slides for every stakeholder meeting.
What it unlocks: Executives stay aligned and have greater confidence, with less manual work.
Explore how earned media influences LLM visibility
Generative Pulse data will soon be available directly within Coverage Hub, bringing earned media and AI visibility into one reporting workflow.
What it unlocks: Understanding how your brand narrative changes across media and AI, without moving between separate areas of Muck Rack, or stitching reporting together by hand.
Find journalists already covering your industry
Ask about the journalists appearing in coverage about your brand, competitors and industry, and spot new names for outreach.
What it unlocks: Build more relevant media lists based on who's already influencing the narrative.
See potential stories before they become headlines
Newsjacking Opportunities continuously monitors emerging news and industry developments, matching them against your Curation Engine configuration to identify opportunities for the right experts and spokespeople to contribute. Each recommendation considers your organization’s expertise, objectives and risk sensitivities, helping your team identify promising stories at the right time.
What it unlocks: Opportunities to engage more strategically at the right moment, before the narrative already formed.
BY GREG GALANT, CO-FOUNDER AND CEO
As I’m sure you’ve noticed, every conversation about the future of communications eventually turns to AI. New copilots and agents promise to automate more of the workflow. New tools promise to uncover trends, summarize coverage and recommend what to do next.
Those innovations are exciting, but I think they’re only scratching the surface.
There’s an old saying in computer science: garbage in, garbage out. It’s a cliché because it’s true.
Every AI summary, recommendation and insight is only as good as the monitoring beneath it. Miss an important story. Misjudge sentiment. Mistake a passing mention for a defining one. AI will only build on those missteps.
That’s why we spent the last year focused on something less flashy than AI itself: rebuilding media monitoring.
Everything you’ll read in this issue – from Curation Engine and Coverage Hub to Newsjacking – started with one belief: before AI can tell you what to do next, it first has to understand what’s actually happening.
That’s what we mean by Narrative Intelligence. Not more AI layered onto yesterday’s workflow, but a new foundation that helps communications teams understand what matters while there’s still time to act.
– Greg
