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The 2015 Media Trends Affecting Online Newsrooms highlighted 9 areas where companies, both large and small, are missing opportunities. Here is the checklist. Use it to evaluate your newsroom.
Companies everywhere are building corporate news operations. We talked to some of the best to find out how they did it.
... If you’re the CEO or CMO of a mid-sized or large brand, you may have started thinking about building an in-house news operation of your own. To help you get there, we’ve created an ebook, The CMO’s Guide to Brand Journalism.
The book will help you structure a team and figure out what obstacles you should expect to encounter and how to get over them. We also explain the structure of a newsroom, and how to map that structure to a corporate environment.
Also provided is an explanation of four business models adopted by various companies. The four models are explained via case studies developed by interviewing journalists and executives at Microsoft, IBM, GE, Intel, Adobe, and other companies....
For an upcoming magazine column on the intersection of technology and publishing, I interviewed a number of smart thinkers about how brands should be self-organizing to create engaging, provoking, and ethical content (as opposed to inane social media filler).
One of the interviews I conducted was with Neil Chase, former New York Times editor and SVP at Federated Media, now a content strategy consultant (and friend). He had a lot to say on the subject of brand publishing — more than I can fit into my column — and I think every company ought to take heed. So I decided to post our conversation in its entirety....
All the wrongheaded bullshit about brand newsrooms seems to believe the gospel that human history began at CERN in 1994. In fact, the history of all this – of news, brand journalism and brand newsrooms – is long and instructive. My agency set up the first newsroom for a global brand roughly a decade ago. Microsoft, then and now, needed to create massive amounts of content all over the world in real time. A newsroom structure saved them much duplicated effort and huge amounts of money, while insuring accuracy, timeliness and consistency. Not bad. The sum total of all this is that brand news, despite what marketing bloggers would have us believe today, can’t be all about hi-jacking events or tracking events or any such quixotic, overly broad enterprise. What brand news needs to learn from real news can be broken down into three important parts....
News today from down under that Qantas Airways is closing its Twitter PR account. What are they thinking? This is like going back to the media relations days of the caveman. Australian marketing magazine mUmBrella reports Qantas will shutter its Twitter news account on April 19th. It expects it’s online newsroom to deliver the news.
Remember those days of re-editing and uploading PDFs to the ‘Media Centre’ section on your company website? That’s the antitheses of what Storyboard is trying to do. With Storyboard, the creators are going for the traditional press kit’s jugular. It’s designed to make it as simple as possible to pull together an aesthetically-pleasing, informative page that companies (or individuals) can use to help sell themselves to the press. Here’s how it works....
Marketers need to increase their metabolism, but the idea of building a newsroom isn't right for most. ... Any publisher will tell you that operating a newsroom is an expensive, arduous task. It’s also incredibly difficult to do well, especially if it’s not your business. Add in the many constituencies at a brand, and you could have an expensive nightmare on your hands at worst or a yet another fancy buzzword at best. That could leave brands back where they started: relying on their agencies. Deep Focus recently created its Moment Studio, which specifically focuses on helping brands with real-time marketing. Deep Focus CEO Ian Schafer is a strong supporter of the newsroom content model for brands and sees it as agencies’ role to make it happen....
A new study shows that companies realize they need custom news content, but they don't understand how to leverage this media for search and social marketing. Online newsroom trends ...The report found that 98 percent of the world’s largest brands have their own online newsrooms. These departments, however, experience unique challenges. Thirty-five percent struggle to keep news up to date, and 51 percent fail to present quality images within articles. More, 38 percent of online newsrooms do not categorize, tag or optimize their news content. This leaves businesses missing major SEO benefits that exclusive news content can provide. On the positive side, 29 percent use video in web content, highlighting the value of video marketing for brands telling their unique stories. Additionally, 65 percent link from their homepages directly to their newsrooms, which drives added traffic and assists in greater conversion rates. As online newsrooms improve, it will become more competitive for brands to learn how to leverage this media for greater visibility. The maturation of the market will strengthen the power of content creation, and consumers will become more infatuated with their favorite brands online....
Here are eight essential basics that your company’s online newsroom should contain.
Are online newsrooms still relevant? Spoiler Alert: Richard and I agree that online newsrooms are still relevant -- when they're done well. But their relevance has shifted. And there are many ways this relevance could increase. This is especially true if you consider how much has changed in the last five years across paid, owned and earned media....
Think content. Think fresh content. Think Google loves content. Think social shares of content. Now when news breaks in a tweet and via mobile device, the online newsroom can hold the keys to dominating online visibility in a three-screen world. This just in … A 2012 survey says online newsrooms are a website necessity for journalists, users, search and social content strategy....
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In our last post, we looked at three content features— PR contacts, press releases and breaking news—that journalists ranked high in importance in the 2015 Online Newsroom Survey Report. But in today’s digital world, “content” is defined more broadly than “text,” so in this post we’ll explore the multimedia elements of an online newsroom—things like photos, videos and audio files—and their relative importance among the journalists we surveyed. We’ll also take a look at online newsrooms that do multimedia well.
A photo is worth a thousand words Given the budget cuts at media outlets over the past several years, it’s not surprising that 96% of journalists said photos are important, making them the #5 feature to have in your newsroom. High-quality photos can make the difference in getting a story published about your company or organization, so providing an easy-to-access, well-organized photo gallery on your news site is crucial....
NewsCred has launched a newsroom for brands seeking content marketing.
Who says no one's investing in journalism anymore?
NewsCred, a six-year-old New York-based content marketing company known for licensing articles from The Economist and the New York Times to brands, is creating its own newsroom with 500 journalists.
The writers, photographers, videographers and digital artists on contract with NewsCred will be at the disposal of brands seeking original content. The company is being selective about whom it hires. The pay is also decent: a minimum of $500 per blog post and $1,000 per article. The journalists get 100% of the fees for such articles. A NewsCred rep says the content is a value-add; the company's real business is in licensing its software platform, which a brand can use to upgrade their marketing outreach....
Should your brand journalism site live on your corporate site, or be a separate news site? Here are the benefits of and the strategy behind both locations.
Learn how Intel has started their own internal news organization, and how other marketing departments can do it, too.... If you’re the CEO or CMO of a company of a certain size (say, a few hundred employees or more), chances are you’ve given some thought to building an in-house news organization. This means going beyond the ordinary meat-and-potatoes content found on most corporate blogs. And why not? Your company is full of interesting people with great stories to tell, so why not generate news on your own rather than waiting for the local newspaper or some industry blog to discover how great you are? You can, of course, also write about interesting people and trends in your industry (not just your own company) and establish your company as a thought leader. It’s all good, as the kids say, and it’s not very expensive. And lately it’s been all the rage among forward-thinking tech companies -- Oracle and Cisco operate fairly large newsrooms, for example. Some companies are even hiring veteran journalists. Qualcomm brought in Michelle Kessler from USA Today to lead its Spark blog, a really professional-level publication that covers a wide range of topics. Steve Hamm, a former technology editor at BusinessWeek, now writes for IBM. Evernote hired Rafe Needleman from CNET. Brian Caulfield, a former colleague of mine at Forbes, now writes for chip designer NVIDIA....
Drinking From the Content Marketing Fire Hose As we launched the site, the iQ team started to work with a team of journalists and editorial partners, conducted editorial meetings and worked closely with the Intel social media team to amplify and extend iQ content. Before we knew it, we were beginning to operate a newsroom, managing a robust content machine and starting to see our goals for iQ come to fruition. By end of 2012, iQ was emerging as an essential asset to Intel’s marketing and social media strategy. Although satisfied with the early success of iQ, we knew there were many improvements to be made. In January 2013, iQ version 1 (the current site) was released. Several new changes and strategies were implemented from our learnings since the BETA launch. So what have I learned about content marketing in the last 11 months? I’ve distilled the 12 core lessons for brand publishers organized by the tenets of the iQ content marketing approach; production, process and promotion....
...What matters is that that real time content creation or what’s being described as a newsroom for brands should not be the focal point of your content strategy. It’s sexy, yes. Everyone is talking about it, yes. Every brand should have one, yes. We even build these for clients at Edelman. But it’s one very small piece of the strategy, that’s it. Nothing more, nothing less. A content strategy (notice I didn’t say a content marketing strategy) enables and positions a brand to tell a very consistent story across the media landscape. It helps draw parallels between what’s important to customers and what the brand stands for. It enables marketing teams to create more relevant content based on what the brand is comfortable talking about online and what it’s not comfortable talking about. It allows employees, partners and customer service to also participate and be a part of the story too. A content strategy requires planning – months of planning in some cases. Before building out the social or content narrative, brands must take into consideration several key inputs before making any assumptions on what they think is relevant, like...
In their survey of 100 global brands, Mynewsdesk found that 35% display out of date information in their online newsrooms. The type of information being left to stagnate includes annual reports, staff bios and product listings.
Furthermore, many are sticking to traditional press releases and 70% fail to provide additional information in the form of video, infographics or other multi-media content that bloggers and online influencers can use.
Only 51% of newsrooms surveyed provided video content and 40% had no image library. Disappointingly, half of all brands that did offer video and images did not provide them in a format or at a level of quality needed for publications.
PR Newswire recently took a look at how press releases sent on the wire perform in terms of number of views. The stats are quite revealing: Need I say more? Adding multimedia to your press releases, articles and blog posts will give you a remarkable bump in views. And since that’s the goal of content, it’s truly amazing to me that only 55% of the PR folk recently polled by PRESSfeed about their online newsroom content, say they are using multimedia with news content. Seriously? Look at the graph again, please. A 77% increase in views. A study of corporate websites and newsrooms shows that not many companies use multimedia with their press releases. The vast majority are text only....
After considering why newsrooms need to change to stay relevant, I have three newsrooms that are changing, and a fourth that re-sets the bar completely. All of the newsrooms represent brands with big investments in owned media and media relations.... [Three great online newsrooms worth studying: Starbucks, Walmart and GE. Bonus look at un-newsroom Red Bull - JD]
What happens when a journalist comes to your web site and tries to find information? Can they easily find what they need or instead, do they click off, and visit one of your competitors to get the info they need? Your online press room should be an important component of your PR, sales and marketing plans. Your press room is open and working for you 24/7. Editors and writers often work late at night, on the weekends and holidays when your PR and marketing teams are not available. Your website and its press room have to be able to provide all the info needed. The most important question to ask: does your web site work for the press and analysts that visit it?...
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Valuable online newsroom tips and checklist from Sally Falkow.