If the answer is a resounding ‘yes’, an online newsroom is a priority. If you want to create and fill your online newsroom with the types of content that drives the best media coverage with investing in the necessary architecture required to do the job, then online newsroom management software is where you should start.
If your answer to the question ‘do you want to connect with the media to promote your messages and control the narrative on your brand?’ is ‘no’, then you may want to delve into why. Is it because you have had poor PR ROI in the past? Is it because you believe that little of what you do is newsworthy? Is it because you don’t believe the media can influence your reputation and success in either a negative or positive way? If you are making your decision on the role of the media on any of these criteria, you may want to do a deep dive into how the media has impacted government, non-profit, private, and public enterprises the world over.
The language of corporate and consumer websites is marketing. Journalists don’t care for marketing language. Instead, they seek authenticity. As a rule (and principle), they will bypass any marketing content searching for the truth and a good story. Your online newsroom should be populated by your PR team, the people who are trained in the language spoken by the media. An online newsroom should have a different voice and focus than your consumer or corporate websites. Doing so can achieve something your marketing sites cannot, free media coverage.
The pandemic caused media companies to implement major technological changes to their newsrooms, allowing teams to work and collaborate remotely. This cultural and technological change has had repercussions on how journalists and producers work. They now seek story sources that mimic their newsrooms. Places where they can discover story ideas, conduct research, and access all of the visual content they need to illustrate and punctuate their stories in one place. This is how the latest generation of online newsroom management software should work. It’s how Lookatmedia™ works.
An online newsroom management software solution like Lookatmedia™ is designed to help you build a library of story ideas, research documents, press releases, images, and video libraries and FAQs, that journalists can discover, access, and use through their primary form of story discovery, online searches. As your team build these resources, it becomes progressively easier to target individual journalists with the exact type of content that fits their beat and story needs. Your team can quickly respond to media inquiries by sending emails with links to the exact story ideas, supporting documents, and visual content. That's music to a journalist's ear…and it's also essential when responding to a crisis.
The latest online newsroom management software solutions like Lookatmedia™ have another important feature. A feature that journalists rank as crucial as a trending storyline. That's an advanced image and video library. Every Lookatmedia™ newsroom is built around a Digital Asset Management solution that allows journalists to register to gain access to an entire library of visual content in the formats and compliance information essential to publishing.
There's another benefit to online newsroom management software that you may not have considered; a solution like Lookatmedia™ can dramatically increase the ROI of your PR and IR departments. You don't need to be IT savvy to use Lookatmedia™. Basic Microsoft word skills are enough to get you started. Workflows streamline the speed and accuracy of content creation. Other features provide journalists and producers secure self-service access to visual content, allowing your PR team to focus their attention on creating more newsworthy content rather than responding to an image request. Inbuilt Google analytics reporting allows your team to focus on more of the stories that drive engagement while the system delivers current media contact details.
Now you have a better understanding of if you actually need online newsroom management software, the next step is to decide which solution is best for you today and in the future.
