Designing the Online Newsroom

By Maish Nichani | 12 Aug 2008 | | Tweet

The newsroom section in corporate and government websites is not just about press releases anymore and nor is it just for the press. The demand by a broad spectrum of customers to be updated on what’s happening at every front of the organization combined with the organization's need to promote and educate customers about new directions has expanded the role of the newsroom. In this article, we take a look at what goes into this enhanced newsroom and how to design for it.

The new newsroom

The new newsroom has 2 characteristics: increased scope and tighter integration.

When organizations think about newsrooms (or news centers) they think about stuff like announcements, press releases and the media kit. It’s not that this kind of information has no value; it’s just that there’s much more that can be done to engage a broad spectrum of customers and not just the press.

Here are what some forward thinking organizations are offering in addition:

In-depth features
Latest news stories
Interviews or customer stories
Speeches
Podcasts
Blogs
Videos

Next is the issue of integration. Many organizations provide in-depth articles and other information in the form of newsletters and brochures, but these are usually hidden away behind deep links or made available only to insiders. Furthermore, departments in large organizations manage their own news sections, resulting in silos and a lot duplication, not to mention confusion.

Integrating all relevant information under one roof has many advantages like:

One place to go to for all news stories and media
It is easier to see what the organization is doing as a whole
It is simpler to manage in the long term
It provides more opportunities to track and improve the information
It provides more opportunities to engage customers
No duplication of information

Here are some examples of the enhanced newsrooms:

Design considerations

Given below are some points to consider when designing the online newsroom.

Be serious about it

Building the new newsroom could be a big change for some organizations. Like any other big change it too has to be managed. The last thing anyone would want is an unused, fragmented newsroom where departments argue on who is responsible for what. Being serious is about recognizing that resources, effort and leadership are required to get this going.

Here are some factors to consider:

Building & training a team to manage the website
Specifying the publishing guidelines
Communicating the change to the different departments
Keeping track and improving the offerings

Work out requirements

Should we allow comments? How do we handle sticky news items or emergency news items? How do we handle media elements? What goes into the media kit? How do we archive the contents? Where do we place the newsroom link on the corporate homepage? Such requirements need to be ironed out and communicated to the various stakeholders.

A good way to do this is to create wireframes that shows the corporate homepage, the newsroom homepage, a section page and a detail page. Present these to the various groups and seek their feedback. Work their inputs into the requirements spec and take it from there.

Simplify the homepage

The newsroom homepage typically would contain the following:

Featured story (may or may not be the most current)
Highlights or other top stories (may or may not be the most current)
Latest stories from news, press, video, blogs, etc.
Archives and other related links
Search (don’t forget this)
Contact information

The focus and arrangement will depend on the requirements but making it simple has many benefits. Putting what is most required upfront and relegating the rest is usually a good practice. Avoid the tendency to make it like a blog. See HP or Cisco for examples of good arrangements on the newsroom homepage.

Give the hub-and-spoke model a shot

The hub-and-spoke navigation model is one way to ensure exclusivity for the different sections of the newsroom. This is necessary for the following reasons:

Users looking for specific information need not be burdened with information from other sections. E.g. the press looking for latest press releases need not be burdened with the latest blog entries.
It is easier to manage and grow that section.
It is easier to publicize that section.

Info on hub-and-spoke

UI Patterns & Techniques: Hub-and-spoke
Gerry McGovern’s Don’t Design What-if Navigation

Feed relevant sections of the website

With the widespread use of RSS, widgets and embeds, cross-linking and sharing information has never been easier. Information from the newsroom can be fed to relevant sections of the corporate website. E.g. feeding interview or speeches on the product or service page. Furthermore, users wanting more information can go directly to the exclusive page on the newsroom dedicated to their content. E.g. video stories that link to the video section of the newsroom (using the hub-and-spoke style). In this way the users flow is maintained as they move forward to access more detailed information.

Conclusion

The new newsroom with its increased scope a tighter integration is not difficult to accomplish. Simple blogging tools like Wordpress is all that is required in many cases. However, what is absolutely necessary is to first pin down the goals of the newsroom and have a plan to make it happen.

Resources

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By Matt Herzberger | Aug 12 2008

I have a news portal for my university created with wordpress. I plan to add video once I have more to add.
By Maish Nichani | Aug 12 2008

Nice Matt. Looks like you’ve put in a great deal of effort and managed to integrate. Have you got any feedback on the integration? What do the users think of it?
By Matt Herzberger | Aug 12 2008

Everyone loves it so far. I plan to add WP tags after a bit with people names and names of center etc so we can aggregate based on that. So far the dean and department heads love it. I also plan to add in external news feeds. I was working on google alerts but they were accurate enough. I’m also working on a social media press release template to add in more multimedia with youtube, flickr, etc.
By Simon Goh | Aug 13 2008

Nice concept, Maish. You’ve created a ‘what’s happening’ place that I feel will be a crowd drawer given the variety and consistency of contributions. The newsroom concept will invariably help content authors separate news related content from a destination page to give it more visibility. The intranet team may also require a jounalist role to sustain the content.

I would also profile (if possible) readers to decide what kind of news goes to the newsroom in response to “I don’t lose out even i’m not tuned in to news…”

Thanks for sharing, as usual, my thoughts are triggered by your ideas.
By Maish Nichani | Aug 13 2008

Thanks for the feedback Simon. The trend as I see it, and reinforced by Matt’s news website for the engineering department, is that the newsroom is becoming hip! It’s one of those areas on the website that has been neglected for long, but now finding a new lease of life, thanks especially to new media. The kind of news will morph depending on what customers want and what the organisation is willing to commit to.
By Maish Nichani | Aug 21 2008

Gerry McGovern has some great advice in News you can use:

“In an age of attention deficit and impatience, news created on organizational websites and intranets needs to be brutally action-oriented and to-the-point It needs to help people do things. It needs to be practical and real. And it needs to be newsworthy-not simply put up because it’s Tuesday and we need to publish something.”

http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article4923.asp
By buy isk | Sep 13 2008

Great article and nicely written view. Looks like a lot work had already done. Thanks for sharing your view. Carry on.