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Notes & Slides: Building a Journalist-Friendly Online Newsroom with WordPress WordCamp Sacramento 2017 Presentation

September 21, 2017 by Sallie Goetsch 7 Comments

This entry is part 12 of 17 in the series WordCamps
Sallie Goetsch presenting about online newsrooms at WordCamp Sacramento 2017

This past weekend I gave a presentation at WordCamp Sacramento 2017 about building an online newsroom with WordPress. Here are the slides and my speaker notes, expanded a bit based on the live talk. Note that the talk was only 30 minutes, so I had to cut some of the slides from the actual presentation, notably the sections about third-party solutions for online newsrooms and the examples of WordPress newsrooms that I didn’t build myself.

Opening Remarks

A few things to get out of the way before we get to the details.

This Talk Does Not Cover

  • How to write a press release
  • How to attract media attention
  • How to do media monitoring
  • Detailed code examples

What Is a Newsroom?

Back in the day (as shown in the Wikipedia photo of the New York Times newsroom in the 1940s), the newsroom was the place that reporters and editors created the news. After the articles were written, edited, and given headlines, they were sent down to the pressroom, where the printers would set the type on the printing presses. These days, the following terms are used interchangeably:

  • Online newsroom
  • Pressroom
  • Media room
  • Press center
  • Media center

Wikipedia defines an online newsroom this way:

An online newsroom (also known as a pressroom, mediaroom, press center or media center) is a website, web page or site section that contains distributable information about a corporation or organization. The online newsroom was initially created for corporate communicators and public relations firms to target traditional media outlets, fundamentally newspapers, magazines, radio stations and television stations. Multiple public relations audience interests are now supported, including media relations, investor and analyst relations, community relations, and consumer social media relations.

Who Needs a Newsroom?

You don’t have to retain a public relations firm to put a newsroom on your website. Authors, speakers, startups, and non-profits should all have online newsrooms or media centers. Anyone who can benefit from publicity needs a newsroom.

A Newsroom is NOT a Sales Page

The job of your newsroom is not to sell your product. You have the whole rest of your website to do that. The job of a newsroom to help journalists, bloggers, and other influencers tell better stories about what you do.

What Journalists Want from Newsrooms

There have been several studies done asking journalists what they’re looking for in online newsrooms. (Most of them have been conducted by companies that provide related services, like press release distribution, media monitoring, and hosted newsrooms.) The answers have remained fairly consistent over the years, and in some ways it’s not that different from what journalists wanted 20 years ago, though the demand for photos and video keeps increasing.

ISEBOX Survey 2016

In the survey that ISEBOX (one of those aforementioned hosted newsroom service providers) conducted in 2016, the most important features needed in a digital newsroom were

  1. Updated and accurate media contacts with phone and email (90%)
  2. Downloadable photos, videos, audio, and documents in various formats (76%)
  3. Current news and information (71%)
  4. Easy-to-use search tools (55%)
  5. Media kit with logos, bios, and standard images (52%)
  6. Social Media tools (30%)

TEKGROUP’s Top 20 Features Expected in an Online Newsroom

Online newsroom company TEKGROUP recently produced a report listing the top 20 elements to have in an online newsroom. Note the similarities to what ISEBOX discovered.

  1. Search
  2. PR Contacts
  3. News Releases
  4. Email Alerts
  5. Photos
  6. Breaking News
  7. Crisis Comms
  8. Company Info
  9. Interview Info
  10. Executive Bios
  11. Events
  12. Product Info
  13. Financial Info
  14. Social Links
  15. RSS Feeds
  16. Video
  17. Media Credentials
  18. News Coverage
  19. Mobile-Friendly
  20. Short URL

Ragan’s Top 11

Ragan Communications launched a service called PressPage with a report on 11 Essentials for a Stellar Online Newsroom. (You may not be able to get it anymore, but I can send you a copy if you want to see it.)

  1. Reachable Contacts
  2. Thorough Company Description
  3. High-resolution Image Gallery
  4. Videos
  5. Embed Codes
  6. Infographics
  7. Mobile-Friendly
  8. Blog Posts & News Stories
  9. Expert Profiles
  10. Streamlined Social Sharing
  11. Click-to-tweet

Aside: of course your newsroom should be mobile-friendly. Your whole website should be mobile-friendly.

Most Online Newsrooms Suck

In spite of the abundance of information available about how to create a good online newsrooms, most company newsrooms suck. Going back to that ISEBOX study and the nice infographic they produced as a result, only 6% of journalists polled said that digital newsrooms met their expectations. Asked to choose the biggest problem they encountered, 69% of respondents cited lack of press contact information. If all you do is let journalists know whom to contact and how to reach them, you’re ahead of the game.

65% said lack of multimedia content was the biggest problem; 54% a bad search experience, and 53%, out-of-date information. (Download the infographic for the complete list.)

So about Those Third-Party Solutions

Almost all of these are aimed at companies with large budgets. As in, Fortune 500-large budgets. In addition to hosting your newsroom, they offer services like media contact databases, press release distribution, media monitoring, and detailed analytics. They definitely provide value for companies that can afford them. Most of my clients don’t fall into that category, but here are some options if yours do.

  • Ragan PressPage
  • TEKGROUP
  • Cision/PR Newswire
  • ISEBOX
  • IPR Software (formerly iPressroom)

WordPress as a Newsroom Solution

Just because these third-party solutions come with extra features doesn’t make WordPress a bad choice for building a newsroom. It’s an obvious option if your main site is built in WordPress, of course, but some companies (like Facebook) have built WordPress newsrooms in spite of using another platform for their main site.

  • American Hiking Society
  • Facebook
  • Kaiser Permanente
  • KQED
  • Nancy Pelosi
  • National Museum of African American Art (Smithsonian)

WordPress Newsrooms I’ve Built for Clients

Over the past couple of years, I’ve built several online newsrooms and media centers, from the simple to the elaborate.

REVA Development Newsroom
REVA Development Newsroom
Erotic Integrity Book Publicity Page
Erotic Integrity Book Publicity Page
American Vaping Association Pressroom
AVA Presssroom
NowSecure Pressroom
NowSecure Pressroom

Newsroom Details

Here’s a closer look at ways to build the different parts of these newsrooms.

Expert Profiles

An expert profile may be part of a team member bio, or it may be separate. The purpose of the expert profile is to explain what your people are experts in and why someone would interview them for an article that’s not about your company. For example, if there’s a breaking news story about (ahem) a security breach at Equifax, a journalist might want to consult an expert in online security for background, or a quote.

Expert profile with video on NowSecure
Expert profile on AVA

News about Your Company

There are several ways you can display company news on your website. The simplest is to use your blog, though if you are already using your blog extensively for another purpose, you may well want to use a custom post type.

Blog Categories

Using one or more blog categories for company news is easy to set up, but also kludgy. While you can easily create a menu item linking to the category archive, your media category (or categories) may not fit in well with the categories you’ve already chosen for your blog, and you’ll need to add some custom code if you don’t want the company news items to show up on your main blog page.

Posts with Custom Taxonomies and Custom Fields

A slightly tidier way to handle this is to add a custom taxonomy and some custom fields. Because REVA didn’t plan to publish regular blog posts, I renamed “Posts” to “News” and set up a “News Type” taxonomy so they could easily distinguish between news releases and news coverage. I then used Advanced Custom Fields Pro to add some custom fields for the news coverage posts, for a consistent display of the link to the original article.

News Type taxonomy
News Type taxonomy with “news releases” and “news coverage” as terms
custom fields for news coverage items
News coverage custom fields in post editor

Displaying Your News

In addition to a category or taxonomy archive page, you can display your news items elsewhere by using widgets or writing a custom query.

Company news shown with home page widgets
Home page widgets on AVA showing company news, press releases, and industry news

Automating News Coverage

If you don’t want to spend time hunting for news about yourself, your company, and your products, there are tools to help you with it. You can create posts automatically from Google News, either using something like the Google News Posts Creator plugin I used on the AVA website, or any RSS-to-post publication tool, once you’ve created a feed from your Google News Search.

  • RSS Post Importer
  • WP RSS Aggregator
  • Feed WordPress
  • WP eMatico
  • CyberSyn

Always moderate these posts before publishing them, unless you’re willing to risk including coverage of your mistakes on your own website.

Publishing Press Releases

Every press release contains some of the same information, such as your corporate logo, press contact information, and company “boilerplate” (a short description of your company). Instead of adding this to each press release posts, create an options page where you can store and update this information. (That way, if your press contact details change, you won’t have to go back and edit every press release you’ve ever published.) I use ACF Pro to create options pages, but you can code your own or use a different tool.

press release options page built with ACF
Press release options page with fields for logo, contact information, and boilerplate

Press Release Post Type

Though I used blog posts for the news releases on the REVA site, I like to make press releases a custom post type. Then I can use the Admin Menu Editor plugin to show the press release options page under “Press Releases” in the admin menu. There may also be per-post custom fields that you want to include, such as a subtitle, or a release date (if you aren’t just using the post publish date for that). And having a separate post type makes it easier to style the archive template.

Press release CPT admin menu
Press Release post type admin menu with options page
press release editor with subtitle field
Press release CPT editor with subtitle field
Press release archive
Press release archive with subtitles

Logos, Images, and Videos

Very few news outlets are in a position to send a cameraperson out to your company. As a result, journalists are relying on companies to provide not just photos but video. If you’re a keynote speaker, you want to make sure to include video of yourself speaking. If you sell products, you want to include product photos and product demonstration videos. Where appropriate, include “B-roll” video showing you interacting with clients, or people working in your office or factory. You can divide images and videos into separate galleries, or put them all into one gallery. Be sure you do include vector (or at least high-resolution) versions of your logo for use in print publications.

Photo Galleries

The type of photos you include depends on the type of site you have, but I’m partial to FooGallery for all of them.

media logo gallery with owl gallery
Scrolling news coverage gallery using FooGallery’s Owl Gallery extension
book awards foogallery
Book award gallery (with links to the awarding sites)
justified gallery publicity photos
Publicity photos using FooGallery justified gallery
logo gallery foogallery
Logo gallery with links to high-resolution images

Video Galleries

I’ve used FooGallery, Foo Video, and YouTube Gallery by YouTube Showcase – Responsive Video Gallery for WordPress by eMarket Design for image and logo galleries. I’ve also built custom lightbox video galleries using the ACF oEmbed field and FooBox Pro.

video gallery with YouTube Showcase
Video gallery built with YouTube Showcase
video gallery built with ACF and FooBox Pro
Video gallery built with ACF and FooBox Pro

Press Kits

Traditionally, a press kit is a folder or binder containing news clippings and information, handed out to journalists at a press conference. But you can put a press kit online, too. This is the section of your newsroom where you include documents like your company overview, product fact sheets, and vector images. The media kit for NowSecure below contains the different versions of the logo bundled into ZIP files for SVG, PNG, and EPS formats, as well as photos of the company founders and the company overview.

NowSecure media kit

That’s all!

Go forth and build amazing newsrooms for your clients. I’ll post the video from the talk when it appears on WordPress.tv.

WordCamps Series Navigation<< Previous PostNext Post >>
NowSecure Pressroom

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Filed Under: WordPress Events, Using WordPress Tagged With: #wcsac, WordCamps

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Sadek Hossain says

    December 19, 2017 at 7:27 am

    How to collect documents like your company overview, product fact sheets, and vector images? Please describe me details

    Reply
    • Sallie Goetsch says

      December 19, 2017 at 8:19 am

      Can you clarify that question? Are you asking how a developer gets the client to provide those assets so you can put them on the website, or how the client can create those documents? Or do you mean, more specifically, how do you build a section that displays those documents? We did it with Advanced Custom Fields on the NowSecure site, but there are all kinds of options, depending on how many of these documents a company has. If they have a lot of PDF documents, you might want to use a document gallery plugin, or a PDF management tool.

      Reply
  2. Roman Cywinski says

    December 30, 2017 at 5:02 am

    Hi Sallie
    This is a great post on Newsrooms and perfectly timed. I am launching a breaking news satirical site and need help on building a newsroom that allows constant througput of image and video. Can you help directly? Best wishes Roman

    Reply
    • Sallie Goetsch says

      December 30, 2017 at 9:14 am

      Hi, Roman.

      The short answer is “Cross my palm with silver.” The longer answer is, email me and we can talk about it in more detail about what you’re trying to accomplish and what it will take to do that, in terms of technology and money, and then whether it’s worthwhile for you to proceed.

      Cheers,
      Sallie

      Reply
  3. ROMAN CYWINSKI says

    December 31, 2017 at 7:07 am

    Hi Sallie
    No problem of course and I will be in touch over the next few days with an overview of what is needed and we can go from there.
    Happy new year.
    Roman (Bristol , UK)

    Reply
  4. Pete Tavori says

    January 30, 2018 at 3:12 am

    Hi Sallie,
    congratulations! This is probably the most comprehensive and well-written post on this topic, (that I’ve been tossing around in my mind for a long time now). Just on question: Have you ever come across a solution that would let you handle multiple clients on one wp newsroom site (ideally including a smart email solution which lets you configure topic categories for subscribers for every news piece; )?

    Greetings from Germany
    Pete

    Reply
    • Sallie Goetsch says

      January 30, 2018 at 8:02 am

      Hi, Pete.

      I haven’t heard about anything like that. It sounds like a great opportunity for someone to create a WordPress-based SaaS product.

      Reply

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