It harks back to the bad old days when entry-level public relations people would spend most of their time scanning newspapers and magazines for mentions of their clients or companies. These stories would be clipped, copied, stapled, and distributed to senior mucky mucks as a testament of how much the public relations department or firm was doing. Never mind that many of those stories were not actually a result of any proactive work, but more reaction to reporters' queries for information or interviews. Clipping went digital a while ago with services such as Bacon's and Luce Press Clippings . These services automate all the clipping, freeing up those entry-level PR people to call and annoy news assignment desks, checking to see if they received their most recent press release.
Companies can access reports over the web or via fax.
PR agencies often use these as part of larger public relations activity reports to their clients. Some more advanced public relations departments are even performing algorithms on those newspaper clips to determine the advertising value of the particular article. In other words, they're trying to determine how much that press coverage would have cost had the client bought the equivalent space as advertising. The intention of this analysis boils down to justifying one's existence. The bottom line to all this frantic clipping is allegedly to show the results of all the hard work the public relations department or firm has done in the past week, month, quarter, whatever.