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Make it easy for journalists to find information in your website

Written by: Kim Harrison

Article Overview: Traditional media relations activity has consisted of a ‘push’ approach to providing information to the media. The Internet requires a ‘pull’ approach in which a journalist obtains information from your website only when they want it. The big advantage of having media information available on your website is that it is instantly available 24/7. But first, you need to make it easy for journalists to find what they want.

Make it easy for journalists to find information in your website

Many journalists now accept the Web for use as a basic research tool. They start their research on your organization by accessing your website directly. Others start their research by using a search engine such as Google. This creates a need for you to ensure you have optimized your site for the major search engines.

The journalists’ search is helped immensely when your website has a clearly labeled media section that can provide answers. Their job is also helped when you have an easily found “About us” section on your home page.

The top five reasons journalists give for visiting an organization’s website are to:

· find the contact information (name and telephone number) of a spokesperson;
· check basic facts about the organization (eg spelling the name of the CEO, checking where head office is located, etc);
· discover the organization’s version of events;
· check financial information;
· download images to use as illustrations in stories.

Organizations spend a lot of money on websites, but unfortunately, the media sections of websites often fail to provide the most basic information for media use. The media area needs to be simple, clean and free of the excessive puffery found on many websites.

The media area of your website should obviously contain current and recent (within the past 12 months) news releases with a searchable archive facility of earlier releases. It can contain the full text, in HTML format, of recent speeches by your chairman or CEO, with an option to access sound bites of the speech highlights. It can contain copies of formal reportage such as annual and half-yearly reports to the stock exchange, the environmental protection authority and other government bodies.

Routine information should be readily accessible in the media area. For instance, details on the background of your top management, with their high-quality photographs, can be included in online media kits. Copies of your organizational structure and policies may be included. A corporate calendar of events may be available. Links can be established to photographs of products.

A diligently maintained media area may also contain other value-adding information such as story ideas, file footage of your organization’s operations and perhaps some organizational case studies.

Journalists don’t take your word as truth. They access media releases mainly to see how you are trying to position yourself. Your credibility improves when the media area of your website contains links to external sources, including media coverage, since articles from third party sources such as newspapers, magazines and television coverage are more credible than your own information output.

Journalists usually work to tight deadlines. They need fast answers and don’t want to wait for irrelevant downloads cluttered up by irrelevant pretty pictures and fancy designs. Many journalists work freelance and/or from home where some have slow dial-up connections. Some also have old computer equipment and software. Non-standard data formats like Flash and Quicktime tend to clog up their Internet connections. The simpler your website format, the better.

When they are up against deadlines, journalists don’t want to wade through red tape to reach your spokesperson. The last thing they want to do is to register their details to access your media area when they just want to have a quick look to see what is posted in your media area. And they need phone numbers and a live person right now, not when your office opens tomorrow morning.

Your website also needs to take the universal nature of the World Wide Web into account. For instance, it is customary in the United States to write a date in the sequence of month, day and year. However, in many other countries it is customary to write the day, month and year. This may seem trivial, but some journalists’ have ignored certain media releases because they assumed the information contained was stale. As an example, 3.10.2006 is seven months different from 10.3.2006.

If journalists can’t find what they are looking for on your website, they are likely to reduce or eliminate information about your organization in their article. Their ability to find information on your site will also affect their impression of the site and therefore their attitude towards your management.

Research by Web usability expert, Jakob Nielsen, found that journalists who participated in a usability study could only find 60% of basic information on the corporate websites of internationally known companies. Among other tasks, the journalists tried to find basic information about each company’s financial statements, management, commitment to social responsibility and PR telephone number. These were professional journalists, skilled at finding information and skilled at using the Web.

Another alarming way to look at the result is to consider that 40% of the information couldn’t be found. Leaving 40% of media enquiries unanswered should be a crime!

What’s worse, the journalists in the test could find a PR telephone number only 55% of the time. Although a website can answer many basic questions for journalists, they still invariably want to talk to a live person as well.

The way to fix these problems:

1. Conduct an audit of your website to see how easy it is to navigate.
2. Check your website PR information, especially your online newsroom if you have one, to determine how well it supports journalists’ tasks.
3. Consider conducting your own usability testing. Ask reporters who cover your industry to visit your site to find standard information.

The effectiveness of your online media relations activities may be measured by the number of visits to your newsroom and by the number of journalists who have given their email addresses to you for receiving news releases and other information.

Related Articles
  Pitching to Journalists
  Is Your Website Media Friendly?
  NEWS RELEASE QUIZ

  Build An Online Press Kit That Grabs Media Attention And Promotes Your Authority
  Can you do PR without talking to Journalists?

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Re: Getting Press Coverage - Some awesome tips here. I've had pretty good success just emailing journalists and newspapers. They may not respond to most of what you send, but eventually something catches their eye. Another trick is to predict what a lot of journalistsbloggers will be researching, and get a press release out that will be featured in Google news covering this topic and promoting something on your site.
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Bad Franchises - . I would scream it from the rooftops but I am not prepared to be sued. This is the reason that there is so little information in the public domain. So like all the others all I can say is that the whole industry needs investigation. If anyone has any contacts in the media, journalists or tv media, there is a huge story to tell if anyone has the guts to do it. I am sure under cover with anonymity many would come forward with their stories.
Re: May Traffic Drop Off from Google's Update - I feel that the best way to make your website click is to target both SEO and other marketing channels. In case it is not possible for website owners or webmasters to invest into other marketing channels, then they must make sure that they are following guidelines laid down by search engines. Whenever there is an update in algorithm, it is only done to filter out artificial websites from the search results. However , it is observed that on several occasions innocent people fall victim to the update in algorithm. If you have an article website and your member copy pasted article from some other website, there is very little you can do to avoid duplicate penalty. The latest tips to avoid your rankings going into roller coaster ride is to make sure :- a) That your website is having genuine and unique content b) Make sure you do not use any automated SEO tools. c) Make sure that your back linking pattern is not a pre-defined targeting same set of keywords again and again. d) Add useful content to your website every single week or fortnight ( if possible) e) Abstain from artificial keyword density f) Abstain from empty pages on your website or doorway pages with empty or duplicate content. g) Make sure you to not have HTML errors in your coding ( If your H1 tag is left open, then it can trigger SPAM ALERT on Google.)
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