FAQ: ‘Vetted Newsroom’ explained

Ask yourself: Would a journalist, blogger, or customer be able to understand what you do and why it matters by reading just your home page? More importantly, would a visitor to your homepage be compelled to share that link with their social network?

All too often the answer to that question is an overwhelming no. And that’s why we created the “Vetted Newsroom,” a project born of two years of research and discussion with industry leaders in PR and media.

Q: What is a Vetted Newsroom?

A: Newsvetter builds and delivers customized newsrooms that tell a simple yet compelling story about a company or organization. It can be a part of your existing website or replace it entirely. These contextual, news-oriented microsites provide journalists, bloggers, and customers with vetted information about a company without losing the central message.

The microsite is intentionally built with minimal navigation: a home page and a series of secondary levels. This “two-click maximum” design is aimed specifically at preventing potential clients and customers from getting lost or distracted by irrelevant and incidental information.

From a technical standpoint, our newsrooms are built on a content management platform similar to Drupal and Wordpress that allows anyone to post and edit easily. It can be hosted separately or on your private server without extensive involvement from a client’s IT department (if any at all).

Q: How is a Vetted Newsroom created?

A: Newsvetter has developed a proprietary workflow that incorporates PR and media best practices. We customize this workflow for each client and provide companies with explicit direction on how to tell a simple yet powerful story. Here’s how it works:

Step 1: A client completes our rigorous Q&A process, which is designed to extract key information for the newsroom.

Step 2: Newsvetter reviews that information as well as a client’s existing materials to ensure that the newsroom content is directly relevant to specific business objectives.

Step 3: Client selects newsroom features (e.g., color schemes, main navigation, multimedia integration, social media integration, blog platform).

Step 4: The newsroom is developed (a 3-4 week process, depending on complexity and customization).

Q: What’s wrong with just telling a story by writing and distributing press releases?

A: Industry studies show that companies pay PR agencies between $2,000 to $15,000 to write and distribute a single traditional press release, which quickly loses its relevance in an age of social networks, viral videos, and microblogs. Where these releases end up unread and discarded, Vetted Newsrooms are “living” repositories of information that can be updated continually and instantaneously to reflect a client’s new business priorities, the changing needs of customers, or even crisis situations.

Q: Isn’t this the same as a social media news release?

A: Vetted Newsrooms are exponentially more dynamic and effective than a social media release because they are not confined to a single topic or feature static content. We review and monitor our clients’ “vetted newsrooms” on a regular basis to ensure that their information remains relevant and useful for the target readership.

Q: Who should build one of these newsrooms?

A: Vetted Newsrooms are extremely flexible and can be designed for any kind of business, whether you’re an author selling a book, a startup about to launch a new service, or an established company looking to simplify a website that has become increasingly unwieldy as business has grown. Our newsrooms are purposely built on an intuitive platform that allows companies of all sizes to take control of their newsrooms with very little web background and training.

More questions? Send us an email or give us a call.