How to make Web sites a haven for journalists

Introducing a selection of Web 2.0 and social internet tools that build a Newsroom for your business.

A Newsroom is an area on a Web site specifically built for journalists. Journalists are forthcoming writing an article about your business when it’s possible to disseminate company news and information. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a factor in getting the content out there [aggregated on the Internet and through news readers], but is not the be all and end all. It is merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of the Newsroom. Going beyond RSS the Newsroom provides rich content—images, video and audio capabilities—as well as social tagging and enabling wider reading on content subjects.

Journalists coming through to the Newsroom on your Web site will require core information on you and the business (numbered for reference later).

1. Names of key individuals, addresses and contact details
2. Photographic library
3. Brief history and company story
4. Events
5. Press releases, tagged and bagged

With this said lets put this together as the foundations of the Newsroom.

1. Names of key individuals, addresses and contact details

Prominence of PR representatives’ contact details on every page of the Newsroom and within any releases, irrelevant of format. Don’t make the journalist hunt for these if they wish to get in touch.

Let us make this Web 2.0. I would highly recommend PR representatives embrace Twitter to not only publish company news snippets but also for journalist liaisons. Add Twitter profile URL to the contact details list.

Linked in profiles should be used by all staff members, but again especially by the PR representative. Include Linked in profile URL to the contact details list. Although Linked in is the main business social media entity, others such as Plaxo are becoming prevalent in the UK.

Does the PR representative have their own Blog which is relevant to the industry? If so add this URL too.

The PR representative may also be using other profiles such as Facebook. I would err on the side of caution if the profiles are too personal as they may reveal unwanted publicity. Decide what to include where appropriate.

2. Photographic library

Gather together any photographs of your business. This will depend on the type of company that you run. For instance a property developer would have a portfolio and perhaps some shots of their office.

It is also beneficial to have some pictures of key individuals within the company. There are many Web sites with poor photographs of staff. Therefore I would recommend spending a bit of money to get a professional photograph taken for the key individuals. Poor photographs will be overlooked by journalists and may as well not be included in the Newsroom.

Also consider that not all stories will be Online. Make available optimised JPEG’s for Online photographs and Hi–Res TIF are for print. GIF’s or PNG’s for Online logos. EPS format is best for scalable print ready logos.

You may or may not decide to include the photographs in a Flickr album, made available on the Newsroom through the Flickr API. If you do, make sure that this is only for Web ready images.

3. Brief history and company story

Give journalists a flavour of what your company is about, your methodologies towards business and which direction you are heading. Drop the stuffiness though and make the story personal and compelling. Journalists don’t need to be reading through reams of company information so make it poignant with some links to past work and any prior interviews which will give the information hungry journalist further reading and clear idea of what you are all about.

4. Events

Got some events lined up that your business is attending or getting involved in? Make sure you let journalists know as they may wish to attend and gather some firsthand exposure to your company and what it has to say. If you are holding an event, these should be posted up on Upcoming and Facebook. Link to both and offer up information for booking and costs where applicable.

5. Press releases, tagged and bagged

Catalogue press releases in reverse chronological order like a Blog. Use social tagging and allow journalists to share information within a release as if it were a Blog post. This is done through tagging the press release with keywords specific to the topic by adding rel=”tag” within the HTML anchor tag followed by the HREF which will contain the reference link to the tag name in question. Technorati is great for picking up tags and propagating them around the Web for you. If you are unfamiliar with HTML, ask your Web team to implement these for you.

The Web 2.0 savvy journalist may wish to document a release in their own social book marking application such as StumbleUpon or Del.icio.us. There are literally oodles of social book marking platforms so I recommend using ShareThis or AddThis to offer up selections of the most widely used.

With the core features implemented, rich content can be applied to make the business more saleable to a journalist. Multimedia such as video and audio can either accompany a press release as another means of distribution or can stand alone as a way of expressing the company’s core values and methodology. If you provide a Podcast [serialised MP3 files aggregated through RSS] or Vlog [video Blogging], it would be beneficial to include a link and subscription to these from the Newsroom. It doesn’t matter if they are not relevant to press releases as they still cover what the business does and discerning journalists will be able to retain information from them.

What else? Topics covered by the Newsroom press releases which have been tagged with specific keywords can now be categorised into a plain list of available tags or better yet as a tag cloud which visually enhances the most talked about topics.

A number of Newsrooms I have seen around the Web display current job vacancies too. Although I would not recommend this as a necessity—it could help snag a potential candidate from the journalists’ contacts as well as show that the company is expanding.

If you distribute a monthly E–Newsletter I would also allow journalists to sign up for this too. Better yet, if you have the time and budget tailor the E–Newsletter to journalists by adding in morsels of press releases, Newsroom additions and updates on who is talking about you and where. By gathering contact details of journalists that have signed up to the E–Newsletter you can get an idea of whom and where impact is being made and make alterations to news delivery as a result.

I am personally building a Newsroom for a new social media Web site that I am planning to launch later this year. I will be documenting the build for a tutorial on how to implement all of this stuff. If you want to find out more on when I will be releasing the tutorial or keep up to date on the social media Web site please get in touch through my contact form.

Tags: birminghamuk, digital newsroom, facebook, linkedin, plaxo, PR2.0, twitter, upcoming