Smart Start: What’s an Online Media Room?

This guide will demonstrate the best ways to get the most out of your newsroom depending on your content goals.

What is a newsroom? What is a media room?

In digital terms, a newsroom or media room is an online informational hub in which all of your website’s content is hosted. A newsroom can include news articles, press releases, blogs, social media posts, videos, and more.

The kind of content you’re able to post will depend on your newsroom provider. If you know the majority of your content will mainly fall under one or two formats, make sure you select a provider that includes said format(s).

How can I best use my newsroom?

An online newsroom can be used in a variety of ways to promote and host content including:

Earned Media Spotlights

If you’re looking to highlight the earned media attention your brand has received from the press, your online newsroom could be a great resource for your efforts.

Use the newsroom as a place to host all the compelling press coverage your business has earned from external sources.

Tip: When possible, incorporate direct links as preview cards or make each asset easily accessible as a PDF.

Asset Database

Sometimes, keeping it simple is the best way to go about managing content. In this approach, a company can host every relevant piece of content produced about or related to the brand in one place and list each asset either chronologically, by asset type, or level of importance. This is a great option to pursue if the main objective is to simply organize all multimedia in an easily-digestible fashion.

Brand Journalism

If you’re looking to create a newsfeed that goes a bit further than a simple blurb and is more formal and informative than a blog, your newsroom can be leveraged as a place to host AP-style articles that communicate interesting, company-related stories to your audience. This method, known commonly as “brand journalism,” provides a professional presentation of company stories while creating content that’s slightly more engaging than a press release hub.

Engagement Center

This approach includes both internal and external applications. One unique way many brands have used their newsrooms in recent years is by capitalizing on interactivity opportunities with their audience through the hub itself.

By integrating social media functionality, comment sections, and forum-based discussion boards, companies can increase viewership to their newsroom by allowing their audience members to take part in the conversation. This strategy can transform a one-dimensional newsroom into an engaging, two-way experience for those who visit the site.

This can also be used for internal purposes. Brands can choose to create separate newsrooms strictly for employees. Doing so can simplify project collaboration, streamline internal communications, and introduce a fun and dynamic tool that can be used to share success stories and personal accomplishments.

Why should I customize a newsroom?

Customizing an online newsroom to align with your company’s goals and branding is the best way to optimize your chances for success.

In the modern era of the Internet, it’s commonplace for companies to create and host branded content on their site in some form of a newsroom. Standard newsrooms can still serve their purpose as content databases, but these rarely generate the viewership and engagement the majority of companies are looking to capture with their media assets.

When customizing an online newsroom, keep the following in mind:

Relevancy Reigns Supreme

Your newsroom should emphasize the content that’s most relevant to your audience at the very top of the page. For external audiences, make sure the most recent and engaging content is positioned at the top of the site. For internal audiences, displaying high-priority items at the top of the newsroom is critical.

Easy on the Eyes

The design and layout of your newsroom should match the rest of your site and be easy to navigate. Play around with the tools included by the newsroom provider to create one that’s interesting to look at and simple to use.

Working as Planned

Avoid slow-to-load assets, low-quality pictures or videos and, above all else, broken links!

These errors can hurt the reputation of the newsroom and give site visitors the impression it’s a low-priority information hub.

An online newsroom that functions without any hiccups is a newsroom that can keep users coming back for more content time after time.

To learn about Newswire’s newsrooms, please visit www.newswire.com/newsrooms