Online Newsrooms

March 3, 2007

I’ve spent the better part of my free time over the last week researching virtual or “online” newsrooms. While most websites have a “news” or “press” tab, the premise here is that marketing and PR professionals should be able to post Press Releases on their company website without having to bother their IT administrators. Unfortunately in all too many situations, the PR department or agency puts a story on the wire days or even weeks before the IT guys find time to put on the company website — thereby missing tons of potential eyeballs and opportunities to share the latest and greatest info with customers and prospects.

 There are several service providers out there who will put together a solution for you but there doesn’t seem to be much of a standard definition of the offering or expectation around the price. Given that most of these providers are essentially enabling a CMS that works much like blogging software, one really has to ask: why can’t I do this myself for free?

Steve Rubel talked about this subject nearly 2 years ago when he observed that Google was using Blogger for their newsrooms but a quick revisit today finds that very organizations have picked up on this idea. Was Steve wrong? Why has the adoption rate been so slow? Clearly folks have figured out the importance of getting their releases into alternative channels via RSS so why aren’t they jumping on the bandwagon to build newsrooms?