These days, every company must be a publisher.
As traditional news outlets shrink, organizations are learning to tell
their stories in a journalistic fashion through text, photographs,
infographics, videos and other means.
Yet in pursuing that mandate, organizations mustn’t overlook a related
task: to ease the job of journalists and bloggers by making newsrooms as
reporter-friendly as possible.
“They have to, because there are fewer and fewer reporters are out there,
fewer people that can tell their story for them,” says Tom Foremski, a
former Financial Times journalist who publishes the influential Silicon Valley Watcher
blog.
There’s a lot of information out there, and if you don’t provide what
reporters, bloggers or others need, they are likely to snag non-corporate
images or pull videos from YouTube, says David Erickson, vice president of
online marketing for the Minneapolis public relations agency Karwoski & Courage.
“If you put your head in the position of the reporter or the podcaster or
whoever and figure out what they want,” Erickson says, “you can provide it
instead of somebody else providing it, and you can better control your
brand.”
Here are some ways to do that:
1. Streamline your newsroom for harried writers.
Many communicators—perhaps most—have experience in journalism. Give your
site a look-over with the eyes of a harried reporter on deadline. These
days journalists have even tighter deadlines than in the past, and some
produce as many as five or six stories or updates a day.
“If you have a newsroom that’s a mess, they’re not going to spend very much
time looking around for what they need,” Foremski says.
Foremski has long called for organizations to “
deconstruct the press release
into special sections and tag the information,” so that writers can
pre-assemble some of the news story and make the information useful.
Can an industry blogger quickly find boilerplate about your company? Do you
provide financial information in many different formats for that business
reporter? Do you offer publishable graphics and photographs of your
products? Are names and photos of your officers and experts available?
By contrast, are your press releases in a PDF that prevent writers from
cutting and pasting quotes and figures? That slows the writer and increases
the likelihood of inaccuracies.
Is information updated and are names spelled correctly? Few things bother a
reporter more than getting a phone call from an organization requesting a
correction on information taken from the official website.
2. Think like a reporter, page designer and video editor.
At Nissan Motor Corp.,
newsroom staffers strive to post interesting assets that news media outlets
can use, says Brad Nevin, editor-in-chief for global communications website
platforms. The challenge is to give it editorial integrity and not have it
look like a glossy marketing brochure that journalists and bloggers might
not wish to use.
At the same time, images and video must be dynamic. If Nevin just slapped
up text and staid photographs, “I think it would put a lot of people to
sleep,” he says.
A recent story noted that Nissan will become
the first Japanese carmaker
to compete in the all-electric ABB FIA Formula E racing championship. The
story included interviews, behind-the-scenes video, and cinemagraphs, or
images with motion that plays in a loop.
The approach, Nevin says, is, “How can we make our stories rich and
colorful? We use the video. We use the cinemagraph. We use the sound files.
We use the social media video. We use the Instagram series of images.”
Nissan encourages industry publications to grab and use what they like.
“Sometimes I’ll go to stories on Road & Track or Car and Driver or The
Wall Street Journal and see if they use some of the things that we put on
our site,” Nevin says. “When they do, we’re very happy.”
3. Update frequently.
People won’t visit your newsroom if you haven’t posted since last August.
Besides, search engines will decide you aren’t a player in your field if
you don’t update regularly.
“Google loves active pages,” Foremski says. “They’re not going to index
your pages if you update it every two months.”
There’s a reason: How often posts are uploaded can tell you about how
active a company is, he says. Regular updates also help you build a
readership that’s interested in your industry.
“It’s good to keep the frequency going,” Nevin says, “and then that trains
people to come back and see what’s new.”
4. Offer different angles on your big stories.
When a company as significant as Google announces quarterly results,
journalists and bloggers around the world write up the news. Often they
search newsrooms and archives looking for different angles or color they
can add, Foremski says.
“Especially around blogs, those can provide some really interesting clues
or information,” he says. “Sometimes you can find stories that have been
overlooked by others.”
5. Offer the right audio, video and search options.
Corporate newsrooms often have a search engine that scans the entire
website, rather than searching a narrower field relevant to journalists,
such as the newsroom assets, says Erickson.
When creating a press release, think multimedia, he adds. Offer audio clips
of quotes from your spokespersons for podcasters, video for other media, he
suggests.
“Both audio and video content are on the rise,” Erickson says. “People are
preferring it, and podcasters are doing video casting more and more. So it
makes perfect sense to have as many multimedia formats as possible."
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virtual press centers and online media hubs. It enables brands to
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