Corporate newsrooms to look to for the 5 ingredients of excellence

by Matthew Weigand

Part 2 of a series on corporate newsrooms. See Part 1 here.

In the first part of this series, I outlined a five-point criteria for what makes a good corporate newsroom. In this second part, I’d like to show examples of newsrooms of different companies that do each of the criteria well. As a reminder, the criteria that I mentioned in the previous part of the series were resources for journalists, the company’s key message, what the media is saying about the company, the company’s own stories, and consistent updates. Strangely enough, I wasn’t able to find one single perfect corporate newsroom that had all five qualities.?

So let’s dive right in.?

1. Excellent resources for journalists

As mentioned previously, the No. 1 thing that journalists look for from a company website is high-quality photos. This is an observation borne of long experience. A good corporate newsroom will have a photo or media section that provides the best possible photos of their products, services, facilities, and leadership suitable for both online and print usage. An excellent example of a company that does this well is IBM’s Media Center Gallery. As you can see below, it is a top-level menu item on the IBM Newsroom main page.

The media center itself is a no-nonsense list of images in categories that are extremely easy to just look at and search for.

Of course, a well-organized media center doesn’t appear like this overnight. It requires dedicated time and effort to shoot the images themselves and upload them with the proper captions in a timely manner.

2. Well-presented key message?

As mentioned before, a company needs to have its key message prominently on display. An excellent example of this is the About Microsoft page of the Official Microsoft Blog.?

With just two clicks, visitors are presented with a clear, succinct summary of Microsoft, complete with links to more information on each of three facets of the company.

3. What the media is saying about the company

It can be intimidating for a company to commit to drawing attention to the articles about itself that appear in the media, but it also is a good chance to show off good press coverage. 3M is a great example of a company that does this, with a “3M in the News” section right on the front page of their company newsroom.?

The company links to articles about itself even in local and regional media, from CBS News Minnesota to the Star Tribune.?

4. The company’s own stories

Of course the real reason to run a newsroom is to get the word out about your own company’s activities, products and services. But in more general terms it is to project an image of a company that is healthy, happy, and giving back to the community. This means publishing more than press releases and earnings reports – a company should also publish human interest stories about its employees, articles about the impact it is having on local economies, and interesting insights into how the company functions and makes its decisions. Putting a human face on a corporation can go a long way towards generating goodwill with the general public.?

One of the best examples of a company doing this is Cisco’s Newsroom. As you can see below, the company publishes articles of general interest on topics as far-reaching as golf, hybrid work, and predictive networks for artificial intelligence.

Taken altogether, the image projected is a wide-ranging, impactful, and thoughtful company. The image as a whole is more than the sum of its parts.?

5. Consistent updates

The last aspect of an excellent corporate newsroom, which is consistent updating, can be seen embodied in all of the examples above. Each of these companies are publishing multiple articles per day on a variety of subjects, making their corporate newsrooms hubs not just for the press releases and corporate earnings reports that a company is obligated to publish, but also as a source of news and information that is related to the company’s role in society and the changes it makes in individual lives.?

The volume and frequency of all of the websites mentioned above show that the company is vibrant and dynamic, qualities that become even more apparent when compared with company websites that have few updates per week, month, or quarter.?

What kind of impression do your company’s website updates give to a casual visitor?

The series continues in Part 3 here.