A benefit of being a member of Robin Good's virtual team is that I get an insider's preview peek into his mini-guides, for example into the third edition of the Newsmaster's Toolkit that will be released in the first week of March.

One of the services I discovered in the new toolkit is CustomScoop, a business intelligence agency that has been providing current contents reports, market research briefings and data analysis tools to corporate customers. The CustomScoop executives seem to have understood how important it is to pick up the idea of newsmastering and allow their customers a greater degree of control over the selection of information that is delivered to them.

In its February 16th press release CustomScoop claims that its Enterprise account customers can now integrate results from other search engines, blogs and individual publishers through RSS. Searches may be performed by keyword or by broad category. The new RSS integration allows customers to merge news clips from the daily email delivery with items from selected RSS feeds. The results from this merge may then be exported again as individualized RSS feeds.

CustomScoop is a privately held company based in Concord, NH. The business is run by Chip Griffin, who has an impressive professional background working for traditional-media publishers and for corporate and political organizations, and by Steve Bracy, who has a public record as a staff member to the New Hampshire governor and as an executive project manager to several large technology companies.

Since August 2004 CustomScoop also scours 6,000 top blogs in addition to its arsenal of traditional and online media. CustomScoop considers itself a leader in the online news clipping service industry and seems to focus on companies, political campaigns and public affairs professionals.

CustomScoop is offering its service on the very crowded market of online clipping service providers—commercial organizations that filter traditional and online media according to customized query profiles.

To use the new RSS feed integration service by CustomScoop, you need an Enterprise Edition subscription. It is charged at a monthly fee of USD 1,499 and entitles customers to unlimited keyword searches, breaking-news alerts and several data analysis tools.

CustomScoop offers a free, 2-week trial to prospective clients. In addition to the high-end Enterprise Edition service, CustomScoop also offers cheaper subscriptions at USD 299 and USD 499.

If nonetheless the monthly fee charged for the convenience of having a daily news clip service is beyond your budget, I kindly suggest that you stay tuned to the MasterNewMedia home page, where Robin Good will soon announce the availability of the third edition of his NewsMaster's Toolkit. Expected to be released in the first week of March 2005, the heavily revised edition of the NewsMaster's Toolkit will describe all of the tools and references that you need to create your own personalized RSS Information Radars (News Radars, Opinion Radars, People Radars, etc.).