At Fuseworks, 2021 was all about customer-driven enhancements and new features. All parts of the product got some love – both to improve popular features and add new ones.

Some of the changes we were most excited about in 2021 included:

Author extraction: The ability to track (and report on) who is writing about the topics you care about was the most popular feature request in recent times. Author extraction is now integrated into all parts of the Fuseworks app*, across all content types. This provides a quick way to see who’s writing about any topic, as well as run author comparisons across time periods and topics. It’s also very handy for news distribution customers working to build out their media lists.

Ad-hoc report builder: One of our big projects of 2020 was launching an all new report builder, to power new features such as topic and period comparisons. In 2021 we continued to build out this functionality including:

• Curate selected news items for inclusion in your reporting (aka ‘Starred’ articles)
• Add your own notes throughout reports to highlight important trends, and explain key data points*
• Use the new author extraction features to see which journalists are writing about particular organisations or topics across time periods, highlight differences between coverage of particular brands etc*

New sources: During the year we expanded both the range of print newspaper content and broadcast news included in our database. Print titles added include: Greymouth Star, Hokitika Guardian, Kaikoura Star, West Coast Messenger,  West Coast Grassroots, Westport News*. Broadcast news coverage increased 30% during the 2021, with an emphasis on monitoring an increased range of Māori and other ethnic media.

Faster turnaround for radio coverage: Getting alerted to important radio coverage is now quicker than ever via Fuseworks, with increased use of advanced speech-to-text technology to power the first pass review of broadcast news. No speech-to-text is infallible so we also continue to have a highly trained Aotearoa-based team to review, edit  and add context to speech-to-text outputs. For customers this means you get the best of both worlds – near instant turnaround when speech-to-text identifies relevant keywords, with the backup of expert review for the cases where it doesn’t. 

Truescope Social: Our social media insights focused platform leapt forward in 2021, broadening its data set and introducing a range of exciting new features including the ability to report on social engagement. This is a fantastic new way to identify which stories are gaining traction with the general public, and understand the sentiment of what’s shared. Even for teams that don’t have a big social focus, Truescope Social is a powerful way to see the big trends at a glance, and identify tailored opportunities.

Other changes: An all-new approach to navigation was introduced to better surface the most-used features within the app; we added the ability to star items from headline lists to curate articles of interest; and there were extensive performance improvements, as well as design enhancements for media releases sent via the Fuseworks system.

Expect even more goodness in 2022 ?

* Some features are only available to Tools account holders, or customers with the news distribution or print add-ons.