Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

David Carr’s weekly column for The New York Times carries an intriguing title: “The Media Equation.” With 430,000 Twitter followers, he’s a unique journalist exploring the world of media for the larger Times brand, with its 9.5 million followers. It’s similar to the 1,200 individually branded FORBES contributors — and staff reporters, too — who now write about specific business topics under our 96-year-old umbrella brand.  

I love the rubric attached to David’s newspaper work. FORBES itself is trying to figure out the media equation in an era when anyone can publish anytime — no trucks, planes or satellites required. Our still-evolving solution disrupts century-old newsroom thinking and processes. It also breaks with tradition in how certain marketing messages are sold and integrated on our growing news platform....

Rebecca Jarvis, business and economics correspondent for CBS News, discusses the current state of journalism, what the future holds, and why companies are scooping up journalists to create rich content for their brands.

The five W’s of journalism remain a cornerstone of newsgathering today, but I have been increasingly thinking about five C’s as well: Context, Conversation, Curation, Community and Collaboration.

Below I try to define each, with particular attention to how they intersect, and I link to one good piece of writing on the topic. Nothing about this is supposed to be comprehensive, nor is it particularly original, it’s just a list of the things I’m thinking about right now and an invitation for you to add your thoughts...

...You’re off to a great start. However, you’ve only started to scratch the surface of the content possibilities because your audience reach is still limited — while your corner of the world is engaged, you aren’t quite at the center of the wider industry conversation yet. If we agree that the goal of content marketing should be to enable your content creators to function as brand journalists (we do, right?), then it’s fair to equate your content effort to that of a weekly community paper. However, there’s an even bigger opportunity here, because online content can help you extend your reach far beyond your current community and create an exponential opportunity for your business....

Coca-Cola have made the transition to brand journalism, using its corporate site as a digital magazine...

 

Journalism is currently going through a transition. As this transition takes place, advertising revenue has dropped off, PR has gone up and ‘churnalism’ has become a worrying issue of newsrooms.

 

But why would corporations go through all the hassle of press releases or creating stories for their products when they could just do it themselves? After all, according to Harry Evans, news is “something someone somewhere doesn’t want you to hear”.

 

Three days ago, Coca-Cola took the first step into the world of brand journalism. It has completely overhauled its corporate site, rebranded and repackaged it as a digital magazine, Coca-Cola Journey. This will allow it to produce ‘news’ to its own agenda.

 

Ashley Brown, director of digital communications and social media at Coca-Cola, said: “Our corporate site is our most trafficked online property, so we wanted to create an experience that would make this incredibly valuable digital real estate work harder for us.

“We want to make sure that as our brand becomes a publisher, we do so in the most beautiful and functional way possible.”...

 

[Journalism? Meet brand journalism.]