For most PR pros, the holy grail consists of a very thick news clip book loaded with lengthy and focused pieces and a couple of TV tapes.
When you spend your day pitching journalists and editors with ideas about your institution, it’s natural to be eager to share your own success stories: the resulting articles or news clips.
In the old days (well, I’m sure it’s still the case in many institutions ;-), this involved a lot of paper cutting, pasting and photocopying. When newspapers started to publish their content online, sending an email including a link to the news story about your college was added to the mix.
But, blogs have started to change the deal: a few PR offices have ditched their news clip books for blogs where they post all the links or excerpts of articles about their institutions.
Good examples include:
- DePauw University News
- The Tiger Beat, The RIT University News blog — this one also includes commentary from the PR team members.
And if you think about it, this use of blogs definitely makes sense:
- Every post is automatically time-stamped
- Each post can be assigned one or several categories – so people interested in a specific topic won’t miss a clip about it
- With RSS, posting and distributing a news clip is done at the same time
- Archives are easily searchable
Not sure you can make the case with your boss?
Just do the maths of how much paper (or trees — if money isn’t an issue) you can save.
We’ve done this (on our intranet, so I can’t share easily). The paper savings has been enormous, and the searchable archive amazingly useful. In addition, our off-site readers love it, since they don’t have to wait for a weekly mail packet from us. Posting to the blog is faster than arranging cutouts and photocopying them, so our student worker loves it too.
The funny thing? Everyone RAVES about the mini-calendar in the sidebar. I try to tell them that it’s a built-in feature of WordPress, but they all want to give me credit for it.