It All Starts With "Let's Try It & See"
Tim Verras of TechLINKS (“the guide to technology in Georgia”) sent me a thoughtful note re: the Social Media News Release & Newsroom. His musings below (edited for length) are interspersed with my own thoughts, in blue.
“One of the more popular features of our website is our community announcements/press releases. Pretty much anyone can come in and post one so long as it has to do with ‘Georgia’ and ‘technology.’
“(One problem with the Social Media Newsroom route that we’ve chosen): it’s no problem to add links to Technorati, etc., but once we allow people to upload media to our site, then we had a whole bevy of legal issues pop up. Because we audit and approve the press releases, we then become legally responsible for anything on the site. Which means we would then have to audit every podcast, mpeg, etc., before it goes live and then hope no one sues us. Thus, after much gnashing of teeth, we have decided to only allow users to link to off-site files...”
Fascinating. This regional news site is willing to allow readers/PR pros to post their own news content, including multimedia. We can argue that, in the future, anyone interested in “Georgia” and “tech” will have their RSS feeds filled up via SEO-powered, microformatted news items, but as of today, this TechLINKS site is willing to serve as a hub. The legal issues are tricky but the intent is true, and praiseworthy.
“This all got me thinking. What, exactly, is so important about the SMPR? After much white board marker sniffing, I’ve come to realize is that it is twofold: Delivery and Concept.
“On the Delivery side, we have the social bookmarking/tagging, embedded video, podcasting, etc. This simply makes intelligent use of the wonders of interweb - the media isn’t new, the methods of delivery are. This is an important distinction. Boring, directionless content delivered through a new medium is still boring, directionless content.”
Amen!
“On the Conceptual side – and this is the interesting bit – we have a movement to cut all of the garbage out of a press release and distill it to its main conceptual points. So perhaps, to better insure the success of the SMPR format, we should be pushing the conceptual differences more than the technological/new delivery aspects: they enable us to offload superfluous content and force us to distill information into usable, digestible pieces that contain actual meaning.
“Essentially, we’re admitting to ourselves that press releases are not art and journalism is not regurgitating press releases. In the end, the result is that we’ll have useful press releases and interesting writing.”
Tim, first off, I love that line: “press releases are not art and journalism is not regurgitating press releases.” Fair warning: I’ll probably steal it. Meanwhile, though, I do think you’ve just-nearly-missed an important point.
I laud TechLINKS for its willingness to open the doors to all users’ (revelant) content. I agree that distilling news to its essence – and adding links and multimedia - makes it easier for journalists to write better stories.
Yet, given your open-door policy for the website postings, it seems surprising to me that when talking about SMPRs, you’ve focused on the “traditional” journalist community – but in doing so missed out on one of the other “ends,” i.e., that we can use SMPRs to empower users to discuss and disseminate all-or-part of each news release, in an open forum. Even if a news announcement never garners “traditional” ink, it would still be cool for a small community of users to coalesce and discuss individual releases posted to the TechLinks site, eh?
To receive insights from perfect strangers, who have taken a lot of time to think through the issues… It’s why I dig this whole blogging thang.
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Comments
A bit late, I know, but better than never. Todd, thanks for your kind words. We’re really trying to bring the social media “right-to-respond” aspect into the new website (which is going out for developer bid this week) and press releases are one of those area where we through about adding R2R. Eventually we decided against it, not out of any problem with allowing comments on PR, mind you, but rather out of the fact that the kind of announcements we deal with would not show any particular value in having R2R.
It gets back to my will to avoid using technology for technology’s sake. As we are so focused on the tech industry, the PR that comes through our filters is generally devoid of anything worth commenting on – new software releases, office moves, major new projects – all fairly insular stuff. We have included it on our community publishing and thought leader sections in order to open a dialogue in the community on a given topic.
It’s important, I think, not to be horse whipped into thinking that R2R needs to be everywhere on the web. Yes, it is one of the great things about the web, but having it everywhere just for the sake of having it is a bit like the old school html blink tag. Sure it was neat – maybe it even had a place (doubtful) – but people often used it just because it was there and it was something print couldn’t do. Like all things, natural selection – that great chisel of superfluity - took hold of it and sent it off into the Void. R2R is important, but the next few years will see the web selecting for where it will be useful and where it will be some mal-adapted bone growing out of our collective foreheads.
Posted by: Tim Verras | April 12, 2007 10:07 AM