What is media-monitoring?

Mimi is a local media monitoring tool built for press and comms teams who want to track news headlines without sending any data off their own machine. It runs entirely on your computer, and the only thing it talks to over the network is the public RSS feeds of news outlets. It does not use AI, does not call any paid service, does not need an account, and does not collect personal or usage data. It is meant for one person on one machine, though an organization could add its own login system on top if it wanted a shared version. What it actually does is pull headlines, short summary lines, publication names, times, and article links straight from official RSS feeds, then filter them against searches you set up yourself. The result is a single self-contained HTML report that you can print, email, or save. It does not scrape full article text, since RSS feeds are only what publishers choose to make public, not a replacement for an actual subscription. Getting started takes about five minutes with Python 3.10 or newer: clone the repository, create a virtual environment, and install three small dependencies. From there you can run a command-line tool that reads searches from a config file, or a small web control panel where you build searches interactively, combine multiple queries into one report, remove irrelevant articles before printing, and save searches to rerun later. There is also a playful feature that rolls a random search from a pool of around 900 keywords across UK and US outlets. Searches are defined in a YAML file, where each entry names a section, lists keywords, sets a match mode, a time range, and which publications to check. Adding a new publication means listing its RSS feed URL in a separate registry file. The README is upfront about limits: RSS feeds usually only hold the most recent 20 to 150 items, so older articles from busy outlets can fall out of range quickly, and a handful of major outlets such as The Times, Reuters, and the Associated Press no longer offer usable public feeds at all.