Mediaportal Reports are the perfect way to share information and keep your key stakeholders informed. Keep reading for more information on building reports to share media intelligence with your team. You may also like to download and save this Cheat Sheet for future reference.

This article has information about building reports using PDF, Email, Excel or Plain Text formats – it doesn’t include the Custom report format.  Custom Reports have some additional features, like advanced theming options and the ability to  include external content in your reports.

• For more information on the benefits of using Custom reports and why you might use a Custom report over a web-based report, check out this article.
• For a guide to building your Custom report, check out this article here.
• There’s also a list of FAQs about the Custom report format here.

Report Builder is one of the most commonly used parts of Mediaportal. You can find the Report Builder tool under Monitor in the navigation sidebar, to the left of your screen.

Before you click on the Report Builder tool you need to add some media items to your report. If your report is empty, you’ll see this prompt:

Adding items to report

Find the media items you’d like to add to your report, either in your monitoring folders or your search results. Select the media items you’d like to add to your report by ticking the check box to the left of each item. When you select a media item, you’ll see a bright blue action bar appear at the top of the screen. Click the Add to Report icon to add the selected items to your report.

When you add items to your report you will see a coloured triangle in the top left corner of each media item. These triangles help you keep track of which items are already sitting in the Report Builder tool, so you can keep working and adding items.

You’ll also notice the item counter beside Report Builder update, on the navigation sidebar on the left side of your screen. You’ll be able to tell at a glance how many items are sitting in the builder.

You can add coverage to your report from multiple briefs or folders inside Mediaportal. Your selected items will be saved in Report Builder until you logout or clear your report.

Building your report

Once you’ve added all the items you need click on Report Builder to start creating your report.

This is where you’ll format and build your report.

First, click on the dropdown menu under Templates to choose your report format.  You can choose from five different report formats:

• Custom
• PDF
• Email
• Plain text file
• Excel file

The options available to customise your report will depend on which format you select.

PDF, Email, Plain Text, Excel

Click on the title field to rename your report. You can also fill in the  Summary field to add some extra commentary to your Report. This is a great place to add context or alert your reader to particular items. Just type any commentary you have into the text box and use the buttons above to format. If you don’t need to add any commentary just leave this field blank.

You’ll options to format and customise your report in the panel on the left side of your screen. The format that you select in Templates will influence the options that you see below.

Use the  dropdown menu under Options to choose how your coverage will appear in your report. Selecting List headlines will make your report smaller, whereas List summaries or List full text will create reports with more detail. N.B. full text will only display for print articles, where that information is available. If you want to build a pdf with only the appended print articles, select List print articles only.

Use the checkboxes to customise the level of detail on each media item in your report. The relevant checkboxes will show for the format that you select under Templates.

• Select Show thumbnails and outlet logos to include thumbnails or logos for media items in your report. This may increase the file size and the build time for your reports.
• Select Include comments to add any comments made on media items to your Mediaportal Report. Untick this if your team has been making notes on media items that you don’t want to include on a report going to a broader group of stakeholders
• Select Add links to full text to include a link on newspaper/magazine items that you can click to read the full text for that media item
• Select Add links to outlet and contact details to turn media outlet and journalist names into hyperlinks – anyone viewing the report can click on these links to be taken through to the Connect profile page for that outlet/contact. That page will give the viewer contact details to get in touch with that media outlet or journalist.
• Select Append original print articles to add the newspaper/magazine articles to the end of your pdf report
• Select Allow duplicates from different folders to allow duplicate media items in your report. If the same article is in two different folders, and both have been added to your report tick this box for the article to appear twice in your report
• Select Enable Play Now links for broadcast to include Play Now or ordering links in the body of your report. This will allow recipients of the report to stream pre-purchased broadcast audio and video content or order it.

Use the Group by and Sort by menus to organise the order in which your media items appear.

If you select ‘Sort by Manual’ in the Sort by column you can drag-and-drop the report groupings into place, and drag-and-drop individual media items within each grouping.

To drag-and-drop, just hover your mouse to the left of the grouping title or the media item. Click the crosshairs that appears, and hold down your mouse to drag to drag the item into place.

When you’ve finished organising and formatting your report, just click Build this report in the top right hand corner of your screen.

If you selected PDF, Plain Text file or Excel file as your report format, your report will begin to build straight away. If you selected to send as email, your report will be sent to the email address associated with your login. You can check and modify this email address in your Mediaportal Settings.

Clearing your report

When you add items to Report Builder those items will stay there until you logout of Mediaportal or remove the items manually. You can remove individual media items from your report by selecting them, and then clicking Remove on the bright blue action bar that appears.

You can remove all of the items sitting in Report Builder at once by clicking Remove all items.  This works well if you want to build a whole new report with fresh items.

Data in reports

You’ll notice that media items in your reports come with useful data – like a word count or an ASR figure.

You can control the data that is included in your report in Coverage Options, which you can find by clicking on Coverage Tools in the Coverage area. Choose Coverage Options in the dropdown menu and stay on the Media display tab.

Use the Media item details section to control how much detail is shown on each media item. For each media type, you can choose what details are shown onscreen in Mediaportal, and in emails and reports.