Traditional news media is under pressure by digitalisation and disruption in the market. This disruption means opportunities for new types of media, new news sources and a different understanding of news (just look at “fake news”). More and more people are getting their majority of new information from private blogs and similar sites rather than the established news media. As a brand, this is a situation you can take advantage of. Start telling your stories through your own media channel and take control of the story surrounding your brand – your brand, your news on your press room.
The challenge
The greatest challenge that you are facing is that you, as a brand, is biased and most readers will be aware of that to different degrees. It is a long shot to hope to achieve the appearance of objectivity equalling a big newspaper (that by the way isn’t unbiased either) but as a brand, you have a very specific knowledge and insight related to your industry and your customers, and that is your advantage.
There are different measures you can take to make your brand and your stories appear as interesting and credible as possible:
The solution: Present your news in a credible news format
In order to establish a successful newsroom, you should communicate your brands strategic content, your brand story and your organisation culture in a way that lives up to strict editorial standards, as that is the way that the public has come custom too receiving news.
By presenting your content in a credible and familiar format you can strengthen the perceived credibility of the actual content and of your brand as a whole. The following is the main points you should take into consideration:
- Use images that support the story, but also appears professional and looks like something you would see in a well-regarded newspaper and not something from a cheap stock photo site (you can use stock photos just use good once).
- Structure your story like a (online) newspaper, both because it is a very effective and pleasing format for the reader, but also because that is the format which people has gotten used to consume credible content in.
- For the same reason as above, you should apply precise tags and category labels, display the publication date, author and so on.
Know to whom you are writing
Last but not least, and yes it is kind of obvious, but your choice of subject, the framing of the stories and the specific wording depends on your audience. Also, you don’t necessarily have the same audience for all your content, so it is important that you make it clear for every story.
If you want to have your own online pressroom, you will find that there are different options to go with, one of which is the free service Hype.News (https://hype.news/en/landing-pages/free-newsroom)