It seems that as information nears the point of zero-price (not zero-cost), new types of tools and processes must emerge to take advantage of this seeming wealth of information.

Even information that is free comes at a cost.

"Making information free to individuals who cannot afford to pay for it—as well as developing software to support authors, editors, and reviewers—to fuel the democratization of information is not easy ..." Sandy Serva, EContent Magazine

The services and products that will emerge to harvest what is quickly being commoditized is (and will continue to be) a large market opportunity. The notion of a NewsMaster was recently coined by Robin Good. Other roles (that each demand tools) are emerging each day.

Imagine the challenges ahead for today's Webmasters who will soon find these tasks at their doorsteps:

• Find the most relevant RSS items from a variety of information feeds that philosophically support our newest upcoming product release and splice them into one feed. Oh, and could you splice in an item that points to our press release? One last thing, make sure none of our 17 competitors' domains are referenced in that feed.
• Syndicate the most recent press releases (which occured in the last 30 days) from each of our 300 resellers into one page on our Web site.
• Combine the most favorable ideas about our new beverage from bloggers and mobloggers. Put it into a secure system where we can use it like a news resource. Oh, and make it easy for us to comment on each item but make sure the comments are in RSS form as well - we have time to read the comments, but we don't have time to actually browse this content. 
• Review our 50 RSS feeds for any errors such as encoding issues, broken links, and spelling errors. Also, remove any references to any reseller who is not current on their accounts.
• Create a media crisis center to cover news about the 1300 people our company just hospitalized due to a toxin spill in Alaska. It should have a real-time Weblog, RSS feeds, and a streaming feed from our CEO which will be finished in three minutes. Oh, and could you get some high Google visbility on this by morning. One last thing - we need the site online in 55 minutes.

This is what NewsMasters are faced with.

Media rooms can benefit from RSS in many ways. The usual suspects include press releases and keeping jurnalists abreast of changes and announcements. But consider the bigger possibilities of syndicating knowledge...

• Video snippets - aggregating the latest video clips of the CEO.
• Newsjacking opportunities - secure feeds to your rapid news response team.
• Business intelligence - secure feeds to the mar-com group providing the latest news and announcements from competitors.
• Journalist watch - a collection of feeds that provide your mar-com group with the latest blog posts and articles about your company.

Although I'm a big fan of preparedness, dark sites, Web sites designed to provide immediate response in the event of a crisis, represent some technological challenges. The benefit of a site is that it can be found. The purpose of a crisis site is that it shouldn't be found until such time as there is a reason for it to be found. By definition, the content in a crisis site is not known until a crisis actually occurs. This represents a number of quandaries.

• How do you keep it "dark" and hidden from search engines until it is needed? 
• How do you compel search engines to index it the moment it is visible?
• Are there ways to prepare a clean-sheen site that remains indexed but is non-polluting of the corporate message or sending signals that the business anticipates crisis?
• Should the architecture of a dark site be virtual (i.e., pulling content from a variety of places at the moment it is needed and not a second sooner)?

I don't have answers to these questions but I certainly admire the problem.

This is apparently a useful tactic for generating opportunistic PR. So, how can technology make it easier to newsjack? Here's one idea...

Create a secure space where tactical processes aimed at generating newsjack stories can be performed and published in minutes.

"the vast majority of PR professionals are pretty hopeless at newsjacking - the ability to spot a story as it breaks, then capitalise on it by providing relevant input that gets the client into those stories in media that are covering them" -- PR Insight

This involves the creation of a high-velocity newsjacking triage space where the following functional requirements exist:

• An hourly news harvesting service that continually searches for stories that your firm can leverage. The queries must exert laser-like focus on specific key-phrases that have been previously identified as appropriate topics for newsjacking objectives. The prime objective here is to create an automated briefing system.
• The briefing content must flow out as syndicated streams so that the client and the PR experts can see them as they unfold. RSS is probably the most useful delivery mechanism for this, although e-mail notification and certainly integrated instant messaging tools should not be ruled out.
• When a story is identified as a good newsjacking opportunity, the space needs to provide immediate notification to the newsjack team; a collection of people identified [in advance] that will act on the opportunity. Imagine a system that telephones the team on a single mouse click. DVCO has done something similar for skiers that want to know when ski areas have a fresh supply of overnight powder - it's called PowderPhone.
• Each item in the triage space must include friction-free menu options to transform an opportunity into a series of actionable tasks and rapidly communicate action items. It should be effortless for the client to guide the newsjacking process with comments about an opportunity. The client comments and the news opportunity should immediately flow to the PR expert who can then execute appropriately. Furthermore, VoIP technology and other call systems products should be considered. Given the ease of production and reach of Weblogs, the triage space should be tightly integrated with the clients blog systems. It should be effortless for the newsjacking process to compose a blog post in minutes beased on client feedback.

There are many conceptual features that can transform the back-office portion of your media room into a newsjacking engine. Furthermore, a loosely-coupled architecture presents huge opportunities to take advantage of high-velocity news creation.

Most people in the PR business (and mar-comm departments) falsely believe that journalists must adopt RSS readers before RSS will become important.

"How many of your colleagues (journalists) are using an RSS aggregator? How many of them tell PR people to make their press releases and materials available as RSS, instead of sending them by e-mail?" -- cbasturea@gmail.com

Unfortunately that may be the wrong question. What if you could have RSS from any content source regardless of whether the provider intended you to have it?

"The problem with the PR industry is that it’s fairly slow to pick up on [the use of such technologies – as RSS]. I still receive an enormous amount of e-mails from PR people, which shows that – after two years – many of them still haven’t read what I’ve posted [in my “Letter to Public Relations People”]. So it will take a while." -- Dan Gilmore

And this may be the wrong answer. What if a new class of journalists were to emerge that know how to leverage loosely-coupled systems and get RSS from any information source? What if this new class understood how to disrupt traditional reporting and writing processes with technologies.

The adoption rate of RSS in journalism will not be affected by the historical artifacts of the profession. Journalists that want to compete for better stories, and at a faster clip, and with better research will find a way to use these tools long before the PR industry has adopted them.

Managing documents for public Internet use is not an exact science. Companies prefer not to use Microsoft Word formats on the public Internet because it can be so easily reporposed. PDF's, on the other hand, are protected but make it difficult for journalists to reuse the text. Is there a compromise? I think so - Macromedia's FlashPaper™. Harry Hayes (Sausage) turned me on to this a few weeks ago.

Here's an example document in FlashPaper format. Sorry, it's a large document because I wanted to see if there were any compression benefits. There are - the original Word version is 1.35 mb's; the PDF version is 1.6 mb's, and FlashPaper comes in at a reasonable .98 mb's.

Using the Flash™ player (which reportedly rests on a half billion desktops), you can view this document in your Web browser. Furthermore, the FlashPaper™ application allows you to select possible actions on the document, so I set this paper to allow tech highlighting. I fully expected a right click on the selected range to offer me a copy option, but it doesn't. However, ctrl-c works. Give it a try.

The document zoom controls are pretty nice for scanning and looking for a graphic that you want to explore in deeper detail. And I like the full text search feature - very handy.

I'm not a document format expert, but I believe FlashPaper™ has legs in areas where media rooms need to publish and provide journalists with friction-free access to documents and viewing models that are productive.

So, what do journalists want? Tell me.

If one of the objectives of a media room is to create a highly productive experience for journalists, media room products must embrace the fact that the journalists day begins and ends with Microsoft Office™. One importand and overlooked capability in Office™ is Smart Tags support.

Imagine providing smart tag subscriptions for journalists so that when a term of phrase is used in your media room, the term is automatically tagged in Word™ documents created or viewed by journalists. Most people think this happens now when press releases and other whitepapers are tagged with embedded links. Smart tags are different - they happen automatically and are based on key terms and phrases that naturally occur in the media room content.

Smart tags are so confusing and misunderstood, you have to try it yourself to begin to appreciate how beneficial they may be to your media objectives. As an example, subscribe to the smart tags feed for this Weblog and type the term "media room" into a Word™ document. When you hit the space bar, this term will automatically tag itself. Links from that tag will bring you back to various points in this Weblog. As new terms and items are added to this Weblog, the smart tag interface will reflect those terms in all Microsoft Office documents you use.

This [appears] to be a useful model for increasing journalists' productivity while building a pub-sub relationship that offers instant awareness in the context of all work that the journalists engage in.

"Anders Brown recognizes Smart Tags as the greatest innovation in Office XP. 'Effectively, it provides the ability to dynamically recognize user input and then link that user input, depending on what that text is, to relevant action.'" -- Microsoft Access Advisor

Actually, Anders tells only part of the story. This is publish-subscribe, so it's purely opt-in which means journalists will pick the subscripltions that are most meaningful to their work, and of even greater importance, tags are applied to Office documents that people send you, so you you see other people's documents tagged in ways that are meaningful to you and the terms that are part of your interest base.

I was browsing for new examples of media rooms last night and I noticed that GlaxoSmithKline includes a "Product Pipeline" page. They actually publish what's happening inside their company at a product development level in their media room. These are highly manicured pieces of information but it suggests the need to integrate information from areas of the organization not commonly considered part of the media mangement process.

As demand for higher velocity information sharing increases, media room designers must consider automated processes that transform internal information into published media-intended content through trusted business processes. The technologies likely to enable media rooms to play a role in providing seamless integration include XML, SOAP, RSS, and publishing standards like XBRL.

So, what could you do with a media room API? Perhaps a number of cool things, but let's focus on saving time and increasing operational efficiency.

XBRL could be used to transport and present financial statements without any intermediate steps. As soon as the company publishes the data, it could be live on the media room.

• Imagine a crisis center that automatically springs to life and morphs to accomodate new graphics, text, and contact information. SOAP makes it possible to send complex messages to media room management tools.
• Imagine a media room that uses RSS to integrate news from a number of content management systems across a global organization. RSS is quite useful for aggregating information from disparate resources and content systems making it possible to present a unified information source (i.e., the media room).

In each of these suggestions, lots of people and steps are presently required and so there is a greater possibility for human error and delay in bringing the information to the journalists.

As you ponder the technology platform for your media room consider the possibility that information may come from a variety of applications and sources. Build your platform in a way that supports agility, content processes that cannot be fully anticipated today.

Here's a short list of new and innovative models that are finding their way to the corporate media room.

• Audio and video files delivered through branded news-viewers. Imagine selling television sets where the chassis of the set itself has your brand emblazoned on it.
• RSS news feeds delivered through branded news-readers. This is a good idea, but I believe we will soon see requirements for secure feeds where each item is personalized for different news organizations and journalists.
• Audio alerts by telephone. Imagine a crisis has occured and you need to manage the story with a select group of trusted journalists that are ready to recieve telephone alerts the instant the content is published.
• Automatic telephone conferencing with journalists. Imagine a media room that's smart enough to tell when a journalist is doing a story. Your media room platform calls you (the CMO) and informs you that a journalist has accessed your media room content, used the internal research tools, and has exhibited a pattern suggesting he/she is doing a story. The automated call-back system then offers to connect you to the journalist for a quick chat.