The New Rules of Marketing and PR, 7th Edition

19Your Newsroom: A Front Door for Much More Than the Media

The online newsroom (sometimes called a press room, media room, or press page) is the part of your organization’s website that you create specifically for the media. In some organizations, this section is simply a list of news releases with contact information for the organization’s PR person. But many companies and nonprofits have elaborate newsrooms with a great deal of information available in many different formats: audio, video, photos, news releases, background information, financial data, and much more. A close cousin to the newsroom is the online investor relations (IR) room that many public companies maintain; however, I don’t cover IR sites in this book.

Before I give you ideas on how to create a valuable newsroom of your own, I want you to consider something that is vitally important: All kinds of people visit your newsroom, not just journalists. Stop and really let that soak in for a moment. Your buyers are snooping around your organization by visiting the media pages on your website. Your current customers, partners, investors, suppliers, and employees all visit those pages. Why is that? Based on casual research I’ve done (I often speak about visitor statistics with employees who are responsible for their organizations’ newsrooms), I’m convinced that when people want to know what’s current about an organization, they go to a newsroom.

Your newsroom is for your buyers, not just the media.

Visitors expect ...