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.