Customer Story
How Civita tracks the Norwegian political conversation with Gossip Insights
For an organization whose currency is influence over public debate, knowing how the conversation is moving, not just whether you are in it, is the whole game.
A customer story with Marius Doksheim, Head of Research (Fagsjef) at Civita.
Civita is one of Norway's most influential liberal think tanks. Its roughly fifteen researchers and commentators shape public debate on issues from tax policy to local government reform, through op-eds, podcasts, books, and a steady drumbeat of media appearances.
For an organization whose currency is influence over public debate, knowing how the conversation is moving, not just whether you are in it, is the whole game. That is what brought Marius Doksheim, Civita's Head of Research, to Gossip Insights.
What Gossip delivers for Civita
In Marius's own words, Gossip gives Civita three things that traditional media monitoring services cannot.
Discovery at a scale no team can match manually
Civita has roughly fifteen people who pick up podcasts and other media informally, and between them they catch the bigger shows. But the Norwegian audio and video landscape is far larger than any team can cover by hand, and that is the gap Gossip fills. Mentions in smaller and more specialized shows that used to be invisible now surface automatically, without anyone losing hours to manual coverage they do not have time for.
The biggest advantage is that you discover things you otherwise wouldn't, because it is simply an impossible universe to monitor without such a tool.
An earlier read on shifting debates
Asked whether Gossip helps Civita stay ahead of public debate, Marius's answer is yes. Surfacing a topic as it starts to move, rather than after it has peaked, is what lets the team respond while it still matters.
The platform helps us catch what happens early on.
Sentiment and message, not just mentions
A list of clips is not intelligence. Gossip reads each mention for what is actually being said and how, the message and the sentiment behind it, which is the context that turns coverage into something the team can act on.
The biggest difference compared to traditional media monitoring is that Gossip analyzes the content and extracts a message and a sentiment.
The challenge: a medium no human team can cover
Civita has long relied on traditional media monitoring services to track written press, and those tools do what they do well. Every day brings four or five hits from newspapers and online publications, neatly clipped and delivered.
But written media is only part of the picture. Norwegian political conversation has shifted heavily into long-form audio and video, and that landscape is now too large and too fragmented for any communications team to monitor manually.
“The bigger podcasts, we catch between us, twenty people listening to a lot of shows. But anything smaller or more peripheral was completely unmanageable.”
Gossip has surfaced mentions we would never have caught otherwise.
That gap mattered. Civita is referenced regularly across Norwegian podcasts: in interviews with their researchers, in policy debates, and increasingly in niche shows aimed at specific professional communities. Without a way to monitor that conversation, the organization was working with one ear closed.
How Civita uses Gossip Insights
Marius and Civita's Communications Director share day-to-day responsibility for the tool. The workflow is built around the daily email digests.
- Mentions trackingSearches on “Civita” and on individual researcher names ensure every reference to the organization or its people is captured.
- Topic monitoringSeparate searches cover the political issues Civita is actively shaping the debate on. Formueskatten (Norway's wealth tax) is one example, but the same approach is used for other policy areas as well, giving the team a running view of how each debate evolves across audio and video media.
- Internal distributionWhen something relevant surfaces, Marius forwards it to the researcher whose work or topic is mentioned. For ongoing policy debates, episodes go to whoever owns that issue area.
- ReportingAll media mentions are logged. Civita maintains a separate statistics layer for podcasts, distinguishing between interviews and passing mentions, and reports media reach to the board.
What Gossip catches that other tools miss
Asked what has surprised him most, Marius points to the long tail of specialized podcasts.
We were mentioned in a podcast for the startup community. That's somewhere we wouldn't have shown up in mainstream media or in the more specialized text publications either. Discovering that your work is reaching an audience you weren't tracking is genuinely valuable.
That kind of crossover discovery is what makes the difference for an organization trying to understand the full reach of its work, not just the obvious channels.
Signal over noise
One concern many organizations have with audio and video monitoring is false positives. Civita's name is specific enough that this rarely happens, though some researchers have more common Norwegian names that occasionally pull in irrelevant hits.
“They're relatively easy to filter out. I haven't really registered cases where Gossip surfaces something wrong.”
He also points to the daily email digests themselves as part of why the tool fits the workflow. “It's pleasant reading,” he says. When a media monitoring tool sits in your inbox every working day, the difference between a clean, scannable summary and a wall of raw data shapes whether anyone actually uses it.
The bottom line
Asked to describe Gossip's value in a sentence or two for another organization considering it, Marius offers two.
First, it gives you media monitoring of a medium that's otherwise very hard to monitor, one we previously had no good solution for. Second, you can search on specific political topics and get an overview of how they're being discussed across different podcasts.
For a think tank whose impact depends on its influence in public debate, that combination of discovery in a previously invisible medium and topic-level intelligence on the conversations that matter is the difference between reacting to the news cycle and shaping it.