Can your PR people do this?

Since posting the FAQ about our "Vetted Newsrooms," we've gotten some questions from people concerned about the time and resources necessary to maintain a living content site.

The answers, of course, vary broadly depending on the size of your business and what you're trying to accomplish. At the smallest operation--a one-person shop, maybe not even full-time--it might just be a matter of creating a page for your product and updating it as needed, with or without a regularly written blog or "news" component.

But even for a multinational corporation, the resources needed to run a company-based news organization may be fewer than you think. Let's break them down in a hypothetical company of 10,000 employees with a wealth of content that would be valuable to its clients and consumers but is difficult to find between its sprawling websites and databases:

• The first thing you must do is hire someone with experience in building a real-time content operation, preferably with a general news background. Why? Because this point person needs to have a bird's-eye view of your operation from a consumer perspective, detached from stagnating internal processes and the inevitable fiefdoms that pervade the typical workplace. Editing experience will also be required, especially if you don't have the resources for proofreaders.
• Next you need two or three "reporters" to mine your troves of data and interview people working on interesting and/or important projects (not always the same thing), then write newsroom posts in an accessible way that's compelling to experts and novices alike. These aren't press releases, but your version of "stories." Guest columns are also most welcome from other staff, but be aware that they'll most likely need substantial editing.
• You'll also need at least one "producer" who will construct and maintain the newsroom's infrastructure, handle multimedia applications, and make sure that the technologies play nice. Perhaps most important, this person needs to be obsessed with the distribution of your content on any available platform while being ultra-vigilant for emerging pipelines.
• Depending on the degree of your ambition, you might consider snagging someone from the creative department as the newsroom art director, designing everything from spot gifs to major display components. This would be of particular importance if you want to "make over" the look of your newsroom regularly, the way a daily newspaper does its front page.
• Hire an external web developer to build your newsroom. Internal IT honchos will say they'll need months to go over spec sheets, architectural details, and legacy integration issues before starting, which will likely fall behind dozens or hundreds of other projects already in the queue.

Done. Here you've got a corporate news site of your own, staffed from outside the company or culled from existing departments but not beholden to the established hierarchy.

And you've only used 0.03 or 0.04 percent of that 10,000-employee payroll. Newsvetter would be happy to assist in any way that we can, naturally, but all this can be accomplished internally.

PR agencies and marketing departments will scoff at this notion, telling you it's impossible to accomplish this task with such a small staff. But remember that these are the same people who hold dozens of meetings and spend weeks writing press releases that no one will read. The reality is that corporate newsrooms could replace a good portion of internal or external PR, advertising, and marketing functions.

Consider this: A company can spend thousands of dollars on the composition and distribution of a single traditional press release. An experienced professional blogger or journalist should be able to write a 400-word post in an hour or two, depending on the level of complexity, then move onto the next topic while the producer takes the first item and search-optimizes it for Google, fires it off on Twitter, and posts it on Facebook fan pages.

If done correctly, this news operation can be extremely effective in displaying and distributing your content to those who actually want it, in a manner that can be legible and even enjoyed by relative laypeople who may become customers because they finally understand what you do.