Depending on the size of your organization, (or your client's firm in the case of PR advisors), to do their jobs effectively, journalists need to create focus around a specific theme or subject for a story. In cases where the development of a story requires a degree of research over a period of time, providing access to information resources that grow or change might be quite helpful, and RSS is one way to achieve this.

"If it's going to take lots of phone calls or dealing with notoriously unreliable contacts to produce a middle-of-the-road news story, then the journalist is probably going to pass. The process is just too time consuming and hard (and there's usually other, better stories available)." -- Adam Benson

I'm no expert in matters relating to JRM, but I understand what it takes to write about a specific idea or stay abreast in a specific market segment. Companies that provide resources to make these tasks easier or more productive [for journalists and press contacts] are appreciated by the writers that just want to do a good job.

Imagine providing journalists with pre-packaged [subject-matter] RSS collections that can be subscribed to with a single click. This would accellerate the time-to-awareness about your product or service and generate a single source of knowledge focused on exactly what the writer needs to complete their task. Furthermore, the collection would likely remain on the journalists desktop long after the story is published, providing continuous updates that may compell the writer to do a follow-up story.

Journalists don't like to be surprised, and RSS can give them that edge and awareness in a real-time sense. I were a journalist, I would live inside my RSS reader and that reader would live inside my Outlook client. I would demand the companies I follow to provide me with RSS feeds and I would likely suggest the use of secure RSS feeds that contain content about to be published.

You could take this technical approach to many levels. For example, allow the journalist to additional create custom feeds based on search queries against your whitepaper database or other Website resources. You could provide a custom [branded] newsreader application that includes feeds from external, but complimentary information sources relevant to your client's business.

"Publicity creates a favorable climate so that you can market and advertise effectively. It builds credibility and brand recognition." -- Sally Falkow

And speaking of "favorable climate" - consider the climate your press contacts work in and give it equal consideration. Companies that engage in this level of detailed journalism relationship management will control their message while making it more pervasively understood in the press. Eliminating friction will increase the likelihood that writers will be able to create stories effortlessly. Managing the experience will also attract new coverage.

If you take a hard look at the process of writing a good story, and journalists' process requirements - your media room footprint would likley be very different than it is today.

I cannot stress enough the importance of providing machine-readable information for these communication components. Without it, your viewers have only one method of consumption - surfing for it. This is a time-consuming process that is now being relegated to millions of machines that work on behalf of people interested in knowing what's new, or what's changed.

Today the 'machines' are RSS newsreaders, but very soon they will include research services, mobile aggregators, and even VoIP (text-to-voice) delivery systems. The concept of systems that work for us to distill what's important and what we should spend our precious moments on, is exploding at a pace far greater than anyone expected.

Why are humans turning to machines? Time and volume. They don't have enough time to read the constantly increasing volume of information important to their work or interests. Something has to give and it's the human involvement in the process of detecting patterns that will step aside.

To play in the future of content syndication, companies are going to have to plan for the eventual requirement that everything is XML based and the likelihood that requirements will shift concerning these formats is high (e.g., RSS vs Atom).

"In a sign that RSS is becoming more important to the company, this week NYTimes.com brought publishing in-house and expanded its offerings to 27 different categories. New feeds include the site's most e-mailed articles, automobile content, features from the New York Times Magazine, and editorials. NYTD's Boston.com site offers 13 different feeds. The publisher plans to add a specialized feed for the 2004 Summer Olympics." -- Pamela Parker

The rapid adoption of RSS is a bellweather for companies trying to patch together strategies to deal effectively with the press and journalists. It's no longer enough to provide Web pages as RSS becomes increasingly more important to information consumers whose job it is to be aware of what you do.

But RSS is the tip of the iceberg - many XML formats will emerge to help companies engage in the sharing and integration of news, anouncements, and data exchange. And news agencies and journalists will begin to understand the benefit of doing so securely. The nature of syndication itself is about to explode in ways we cannot easily anticipate. As such, it's time to consider the nature of syndication and abstractly embrace it as a core architecture for all content systems you build and support.

Companies heading into this realm with a solid contingent of platform services include MyST Technology Partners (of course) and DVCO Technology. However, there are many other ways to build useful media rooms by leveraging existing content management systems, open-source tools, and even personal Weblog tools. Just make sure whatever you use possesses a level of agility that can address constantly shifting requirements.

As you approach the general objective of increasing your capacity to provide syndicated formats (even some not yet invented), consider following standards and generally adopted specifications like RSS, Atom, and other XML standards.

Sometimes we look high and low for that tool or technology that presents a better opportunity for doing our jobs better. Most of the time, these are excursions into the unknown and rarely do we find products that cause us to change our basic processes. Sometimes, the search for better ways of doing things leads us back to familiar surroundings; perhaps familiar tools that have changed to support new ideas, but in a familiar way.

Imagine you're a journalist about to write an article concerning Intel's new low-power Pentium M processors. You might begin by copying the text of press release into Microsoft Word. Imagine now that the text of the press release suddenly comes alive with smart tag links on terms that are relevant to your task. As you mouse over the terms of interest you discover that your knowledge system instinctively knows more about Pentium M processors and has called out specific resources that you can access. There's some recent information in eWeek, and Intel has some additional content.

Smart tags make this possible and this behavior is in reach today because of general adoption of XML architecture in Microsoft Office.

Imagine now that you would like more information about a term in the press release (Ultra Low Voltage), but it is not tagged with a smart tag link. Using a simple lookup process you can find additional items related to this term through Office Research Services. In this example, I select my personal  km environment as the source of content to search and the results reference an SBS Technologies PCI board (they manufature products with Intel chips).

Magic? Perhaps, but more importantly, a productive way to do research using an infomation system based on things that you care about. Of greatest importance, this model leverages tools that journalists already possess.

These examples are rudimentary; just the tip of the iceberge. In future articles I'll cover this concept in greater detail. In the meantime, if this resonates with your ideas about using technology to expand your media room presence, give me a shout.

There's no denying it; Weblogs have changed the way information is captured and how it moves about. But is it really this simplified model for content management that has caused such dramatic change in the field of news gathering and distribution? Or is it the nature of networks, both social and technical, that has alterned the landscape?

It's probably a little bit of Weblogs, a touch of RSS, and a big helping of network sciences that has altered the news-flow process.

When I first saw this graphic it compelled me to think about the technologies in use at every point in the process. The only aspect that didn't resonate with me was the liklihood that the types of "dark matter" referenced would eventually become "light matter", joining the visible spectrum of content. Technologies like IMLog will shed light on this dark matter and there are many other tools on the horizon that will transform email and forum content into more useful resources. As these dark matter objects become part of mainstream information sources like Weblogs and RSS feeds, new content types will replace them, so there will always be dark matter on the Internet.

Most interpretations of this chart are interesting, although I have no clue if they are right or wrong ones. I have a particular interpreation (or at least a worthy footnote) concerning this diagram - the emergence of the X-Internet. This is a force (when coupled with network science) that few of us completely understand, including myself. However, I have seen what happens when we build systems designed to embrace unintended consequences - lots (and lots) of strange things happen and while most are predictable, a few take us by surprise. I believe the science of networks combined with the emergence of everything-XML, will unleash a reality that this chart may not encompass. Perhaps the "fabric" of this chart is about the network of machines that will cause much of the process to begin to flow on its own with little effort by humans.

This piece by Bill Carney (Media Matters) is a great list of things that seem like important requirements. However, the experience that the media room delivers is what makes it great [or not].

Although my focus is on the technology of media rooms, the very essence of a media room must be compelling and presented in a form that would have the visitor departing with a lasting impression that the flow of the site provided exactly the experience that allows the journalist to get her (or his) job completed. The consumer of media room information must feel that someone thought through every detail of the experience in an effort to mitigate the research experience. This includes presenting mundate information such as contact data in a way that is obvious at the moment the visitor feels like it's time to speak (or communicate) with a representative.

Greatness is not simply covering all the bases, or meeting a series of checklists. Greatness is anticipating how journalists will react while flowing through a number of scenarios. To that end, it seems to make sense that media room developers consider scenario planning as part of the requirements-gathering phase of the development process.

Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation is a great book for learning the process of envisioning conversations (or interactions) that haven't yet occured.

Another way to look at scenarios is to attempt to anticipate actions that are likely to happen. A useful approach is to use a whiteboard or a wall with 3M Post-it Notes. As you sketch the likely pathways and outcomes of a journalists visit to your media room, the anticipated outcomes are often not pleasant, but these are the most important ones because you may be able to do something to prevent unfavorable experiences that lead to a journalist departing long before the story is complete.

To create a great media room you must imerse yourself in the plausible actions that journalists will take. Here are some additional resources to help you shape your design and your thinking concerning scenario planning.