How To: Part 1

The next three posts will be on how to make a successful online newsroom and what factors are important to include. The first thing to do is to make sure that the press room is in an easy to find area of the company’s Web site. It needs to be seen and easily accessed. Journalists will not go looking for the newsroom. In addition to being easy to find the site also needs to be easy to navigate. Steve Rubel posted on his blog about journalists and bloggers not writing articles and stories about companies because of the corporations exasperating newsrooms. He quotes from Steve Neilson in the Neilson Report saying that people would rather just not quote from the company at all than publish something that is incorrect.

Once the newsroom is created, the most important information needs to be added, the contact information of the public relations department for the corporation. If a journalist has a question about the company or about a news story in the newsroom this is the first thing they are going to look for. This contact needs to be a 24 hour contact. The company can rotate this contact around so one person isn’t always getting calls at 2:00 in the morning. News is 24 hours and your news needs to also be 24 hours.

After the contact information is added, the newsroom can begin to fill up. Posting press releases, videos, pictures, and the list continues, but what is important to post? My next few posts will explain the importance of posting specifics in the online newsroom like links to the social media that the company is using. Fletcher Prince created a video over viewing what a successful online newsroom contains. This video will set up the rest of the posts about how to create an online newsroom. Mary Fletcher Jones talks about the essentials to an online newsroom and reviews why a newsroom is important and who is using it.

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