PR Firms That Blog: Who Got There First

Update: We have added a page to our Wiki that serves as a running list of PR firms that blog.  If you aren't listed, please feel free to edit the Wiki and add yourself.

In the comments to our post on blogging at the world's largest PR firms, Frank Shaw from WagEd jokingly wondered which blog went up first. Erin did some quick research and figured it out. Below is a list of PR firm blogs along with the date of the first post.  Frank wins.

Discussion Roundup: Ways to Improve Newspaper Websites

There has been some good discussion around our post about how newspapers can improve their web presence. Below is a breakdown of additions to the list suggested (or inspired by) readers. Comments are mine unless otherwise indicated. I’ll update this post with new ideas I come across.

Original List

1. Start using tags.
2. Provide full text RSS feeds.
3. Work with external “social” websites.
4. Link to relevant blog entries.
5. Get rid of all registration.
6. Partner with local bloggers.
7. Offer alternative views of your content.
8. Modernize your site’s graphic design.
9. Learn from Craigslist.
10. Make your content work on cell phones and PDAs.

Additions

11. Allow Readers to Comment on Every Story [Via Micropersuasion]. I think this is a great idea although for some papers it may be unrealistic. It would take a lot of time to manage all the discussion that is generated. But if the paper can pull it off they should. It will help them build a Digg style community of users. This ties in to some good advice from Thomas Power: Become a social network.

Note: In our study we found that 13 of the top 100 U.S. papers were already doing this.

12. Improve Search Features [Henry Miller]. The search functionality on most newspaper sites is terrible. I actually resort to using Google News as an alternative if I’m looking for a particular story.

13. Use Better HTML [Joe Clark and Old Grouch]. From the looks of things, lots of papers haven’t jumped on the CSS bandwagon. Implementing cleaner HTML would improve load times for users and ultimately save money by reducing server load. A related issue noted by Angelos is the abuse of cookies by newspaper site. Why use five when one will do?

14. Focus on Local and Regional News [Mike Driehorst]. “Unless it’s of significant, historical or national importance, don’t put national/international news on your front page.” Most papers value is in their local coverage – focus on that.

15. Open Up Your Archives [Old Grouch]. Many papers only keep 10 days of content up on their sites and/or charge for older content. Making more of this content available for free would be a great service to researchers and also help serve up more page views.

16. Provide Multilingual Versions [Gabrielle Tonelli]. A few papers we looked at in California were doing this. It’s a good idea if it is economic feasible. The audience for every website is ultimately global.

17. Offer Supplemental Content [Bruce Bartlett]. Reporters do loads of research when writing stories. Why note post some of the extra stuff on your website? Bruce writes that it “would both make the web site more valuable and improve the credibility of newspapers. It’s really insane to just reprint the same material that is in the print edition.”

18. Open Up the Letter to the Editor Process [Building on #17]. Why not just post every letter you receive instead of just the 2/3 that make the cut for the print edition? Associate them with the relevant article and let us know which articles are getting the most comments. This would have the effect of turning your site into a townhall of sorts. Only problem with this is that many letters come in still via regular mail instead of electronically.

Thanks for all the comments/ideas. Please post additional ideas below and I’ll update this entry periodically.

Laptops, the Coast Guard, YouTube oh my!

> There is an interesting piece on BusinessWeek.com (via Slashdot ) that talks about the Dell Battery Recall program and how the blogosphere “kept the heat on the manufacturers to do something about it and helped the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) conduct an investigation into the burning batteries.”

As mentioned in the BusinessWeek.com article, the blogosphere’s ability to continue to provide examples and data raised the profile of this issue into something that Dell needed to accept and address openly. Kudos to them for dealing with it as they have – maybe they should take a page out of Apple’s playbook (and Rita’s post )  in regards to positioning and ease of use.

Last night in a fit of insomnia I was scanning Slashdot for the latest and greatest – and I stumbled on a link to this article from the Washington Post. Michael De Kort, a (now ex-) Lockheed Martin engineer working on a project for the U.S. Coast Guard identified “several critical safety and security problems” within the project and tried to bring attention to them by going through the traditional processes for dealing with such issues. According to the article, he went through proper channels to voice his complaint – including “Lockheed Martin ethics investigations, engineering management reviews, quality reviews, propram management reviews” and also working through “the chain to Lockheed Martin corporate legal, to the CEO Bob Stevens, and to the Board of Directors”. He also contacted  the Inspector General’s Office of the Department of Homeland Security which is currently conducting a review and reached out to Representative Peter King (R- NY), Chairman of the Homeland Security Oversight Committee. I highlight the steps he took because it seems that he did what any good employee would do in this situation; use appropriate channels to voice concerns about a project.

What he did next is interesting to me – especially in light of the BusinessWeek article I mentioned at the top of this post. He made a video of his complaint and posted it on YouTube. The original video is below

If you cannot watch the video or would rather read a transcript of his video, Slashdot user Pushnell
has helpfully created one.

At 1:09pm this afternoon, his YouTube video has received approximately 41579 views. At 5:15 pm his video had received 47186 views. As of last night the Washington Post was reporting over 8,000 views. As of this afternoon there are over 25 stories about him and his story, and they are on Time.com / CNet.com / CBS news and a host of others. Direct link to my Google News search is here. 

It seems that his story has legs and e has created a profile on Slashdot to respond to comments about his video.

I wonder what appreciable results his posting on YouTube will bring about. Will it raise the profile of this issue to the point that both Lockheed Martin and the Coast Guard need to publicly address this issue? Will the blogosphere embrace this despite having one central source for this story (his YouTube video) as opposed to the many others found on the Dell Laptop Battery incident (YouTube videos, blog postings from many different users, etc)?

Finally, what does this mean for other whistleblowers in the future? Has he set a precedent for them? Instead of a whistleblower pitching his or her story to the traditional media, will YouTube and the blogosphere be the go to outlets? Mr. De Kort lends a human face to the problem that might otherwise be buried in a lawsuit somewhere and thanks to wonders of the archiveal nature of the Internet (and the series of tubes that make it up) his story will always be found in video or text format regardless of the merit of his story. Currently, he is unemployed, and according to the Washington Post,  Lockheed Martin
said that “the video did not influence the decision to lay off De Kort and that he had had been notified earlier this year that he would be out of a job.” Who knows what the details are surrounding his dismissal, but I wonder if his actions can also get him a new job.

Finally, a hypothetical scenario to ponder that could affect us directly in our day-to-day lives. Are we far off from the days when some anonymous ‘hacker’ will decide to not only highlight the security flaw in an operating system but also provide a screencast showing your average user how to exploit this flaw?

I’m watching this story with interest – leave me your thoughts in the comments below.

Newspaper Study Translated into Japanese

Our recent report evaluating the use of the Internet by the top 20 Japanese newspapers has been translated into Japanese.

To quickly summarize, the report looks at the differences between the American and Japanese newspaper industries, and how the structure of the two markets have affected the way newspapers utilize the Internet. It was clear from our research that Japan's unique newspaper culture places a much greater emphasis on print news rather than online news.

You can view the Japanese version of the report here and the English version of the report here.

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日本の新聞におけるインターネットの利用状況についての調査レポートを日本語に翻訳しました。

9 Ways for Newspapers to Improve Their Websites

We took a long look at the features U.S. newspapers include on their websites a few weeks back. In doing the research, we spent more time than is healthy looking at these things. So we figured we’d use this new found expertise for good and offer the newspaper industry some unsolicited advice on how to improve their websites.

(1) Start Using Tags. The structure of just about every site we looked at more or less followed that of the paper’s print edition. This is great if you are looking to read the print version of the paper but not great if you are looking to see everything the paper has written on, say, Joe Lieberman. Newspapers aren’t taking advantage of the opportunity the Internet offers to remix/categorize content.

The social news site Newsvine uses tags, and all I have to do is put in newsvine.com/lieberman and voila, I see all the Lieberman stories. Using tags to complement traditional navigation is a great way to offer alternative views of content and better relate stories to each other.

The taxonomy of newspaper sites is broken and using tags is a pretty good way to start fixing the problem.

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