The Maharashtra government is investing Rs. 10 crore to build a media monitoring cell. According to a proposal proposed by the Directorate General of Information and Public Relations (DGIPR), an agency will be assigned to monitor, analyse, and report the news in Print, Electronic, Social, and Digital Platforms.
The appointed agency will be responsible for the setup and operations of the monitoring cell. It will also provide information on the dashboards and mobile applications. This scheme will be implemented as a separate programme under the DGIPR.
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Initially, the agency will be appointed for just one year. If the performance of that agency is up to the mark in that one year, the government will hand them a two-year contract.
A government resolution (GR) sharing information about this initiative was released this week. It read, “In order to increase the impact of this cell, the cell will observe the positive and negative information related to the govt disseminated through news media such as print and electronic media, as well as social and digital media, online news websites, and news apps. It will point out in real-time if negative information and misleading content are being disseminated, to create a mechanism to implement it in a faster manner.”
In the first phase, news media like print, electronic, social, and digital media, online news websites, and news apps will be monitored by the agency working in this cell. In the second phase, if some new media platforms come out, they will be included in this plan.
News and information will be gathered and analysed by the contending agency designated to run the cell. Its responsibilities will include presenting snippets of significant newspaper articles in PDF format, categorised either positively or negatively, and tagged by section, topic, event, and individual. "News from the electronic media, digital and social media, and other new media will be monitored throughout the day, with an hourly alert on trend, mood, and tone," the GR read.