pr.co presents Virtual Events, a modern way of hosting online events and press conferences

While it’s tempting to build a newsroom on our customers’ input, the best feedback comes from the people using the newsrooms: media professionals. We have interviewed journalists at Dutch and international outlets (like Sprout, MT and The Next Web) to learn how they interact with our newsrooms and discuss common frustrations. What we took away from these conversations: journalists should be able to find the information they need as fast as possible and without needless friction and frustrations. We have translated that into our product with the following features:

• Easier navigation: journalists often visit a newsroom with a purpose. We have made it easier to quickly jump to one of the six most important pages (news, media kits, spokespeople, contact information, company information, and press coverage) from each newsroom’s homepage.

• Improved content segmentation: we now allow customers to categorise news in topics and subtopics. This categorisation enables journalists to get an overview of news on a specific topic promptly. 

• Journalist toolbar: a recurring frustration bubbling up in our interviews were copy-and-paste issues with the PDFs and websites that journalists encounter. To remove this frustration, we have developed a toolbar that appears next to your press releases. A journalist can use this toolbar to copy an entire press release, copy a specific section (paragraphs, quotes, sentences), retrieve the press release link, or copy the source link of an image. 

• Improved search: if journalists are looking for something specific, our improved search functionality will search through all news, coverage and media kits for the information they need.

For a message to come across, it needs to be thoughtful. For it to be memorable, use your branding. Our revamped newsroom solution has been designed to totally match our customers’ branding. Our designers work with our customers’ branding teams to get to that point — colour palette, typographic styles, imagery, iconography, and tone voice; we’ll ensure a completely branded experience.

Zwift, Dopper, WeTransfer, Swapfiets, VanMoof, EVBox— many of our customers have been catapulted into hypergrowth. With our redesigned newsroom, we have made it easier for fast-growing brands to add new local teams, communicate in multiple languages, collaborate with agencies, and roll out a strong news publishing strategy across various time zones and markets.

Journalists’ inboxes are crowded places; journalists report relying more on their curated news feeds and research, and less on the press releases they receive in their editorial inbox. Because of this trend, search engines are an increasingly important driver in the discovery of your news. We have improved the way our newsrooms are indexed by search engines, making your news available to a global audience in a matter of minutes. A nice side effect: these search engine optimisations will also help build out our customers’ domain authority. Happy PR team, happy marketing team.

An important requirement for our product team has been to build the newsroom solution so that new functionalities can be rolled out to all customers without manual development. Simultaneously, we have drastically improved the time required to set up an entire newsroom, rebrand an existing newsroom or add new local newsrooms. Our Account Management team can now design, build and implement a fully branded newsroom within a week.

A few examples of customers newsrooms we have already upgraded:

• WeTransfer
• ING
• EVBox
• Artsen zonder Grenzen

Over the coming weeks, we will be contacting customers to transition to our new layout. Are you excited to get started ASAP? Or not yet a pr.co customer? Schedule a demo or talk to us right now via live chat.