Making online newsrooms work to your advantage
March 5, 2009
Imagine a journalist is working on a story about your corporation (we will call it XYZ). He or she needs information and sources in order to write their story. When they go to your corporate website, they are hoping to find your online newsroom full of relevant information and contacts for top employees within XYZ. If you haven’t provided this content, then the story published about your corporation may not portray XYZ as it would like to be portrayed. Or perhaps, the journalist will find another source for their story if they can’t get the information from YOU directly. So how does a corporation make an online newsroom work to their advantage?
In a RaganTV interview with Ibrey Woodall, and in Woodall’s own article This Year’s must haves: Top 10 assets a journalist wants in an online newsroom, the Director of Marketing and Sales at TEKgroup International provides corporations with a few tips for online newsrooms. I will only be discussing the top 5 that Woodall mentions.
First, a corporation’s online newsroom should provide users with the ability to search through press archives. Journalists may want to find a press release from years ago in order to relate to an issue now.
Second, somewhere in the newsroom, a corporation’s PR contacts should be noted. A journalist may be trying to reach the company’s PR personnel after hours because of a breaking news story; hence cell numbers and after hours contact information needs to be provided.
Third, press releases are very important to journalists. They want to be able to find exactly what they need quickly. Releases should be categorized by date of publication and by topic.
Fourth, a journalist is going to expect background information in a corporation’s online newsroom. In order to write a concrete story, a journalist may want to understand the history of the company. Background information includes corporate history, mergers, locations, and transitions within the company.
Last but not least, photographs! High and low resolution photographs should be available for journalists to download. If photos are provided in a corporation’s newsroom, then there is a good chance those photos will accompany stories published about that company.
Woodall’s suggestions come straight from a survey TEK International did with current journalists. These are the five most important contents that journalists look for when writing a story about a company.
If company XYZ wants to make their online newsroom work for them, they should take note of Woodall’s five tips so that the news stories published about them are exactly the information they provided.
Below is RaganTV’s video interview with Ibrey Woodall:
March 6, 2009 at 12:47 am
Ibrey Woodall makes a lot of good points in her evaluation of what makes a good online newsroom. Having background information about the company is very important and like she says can be overlooked. People either assume journalists know about your company already or have read up on it on the main site, but this isn’t always the case. I agree that the availability of searching archives is important as well. It is too difficult and time consuming to keep clicking around and going through pages of information. By having a search, this eliminates frustrated journalists with not being able to find the information they need or are looking for.
March 26, 2009 at 7:38 pm
[...] convienent way to do public relations and organize necessary material. As I mentioned in my post “Making online newsrooms work to your advantage”, there are a number of key parts to an online newsroom that journalists expect to see. These tips [...]