Friday, September 12, 2003
RSS feeds for press releases
I maintain three e-mail distribution lists. One is a list of every PR contact I know at Canada's universities; another is a list of all the corporate PR types for which I have an e-mail address; the third is a list of folks who work at PR agencies. They all have me on some e-mail distribution list and I figure turnabout is fair play (or whatever that phrase is) and have culled an e-mail address from every pitch and PR bumpf I'm sent. I put these lists from time to time when I need to find someone -- anyone -- to help illustrate a point in a story. When I need to find a company that's hiring or firing to star in a TV report on the latest unemployment numbers, I blast a plea out to one of these lists and ask for help. If I need a university expert who can talk to me about Canada's electrical grid -- bingo -- an e-mail goes flying off to the university PR types.
Yesterday, I sent a blast out to all three lists asking if anyone was using RSS feeds for their press releases. This message went to probably 1,000 PR professionals across the country -- corporate, agency, and institutional types. I got back less than two dozen responses. All but one was a variation on the theme of "What the heck is an RSS feed?" I know it's still early days for RSS and all that but I sure hope it catches on. Even more so that I just discovered News Gator as a reader on my Windows machines. News Gator pops your feeds into Outlook/Exchange so they appear as e-mail does. Big advantage there is that I'm staying in the application -- Exchange -- I spend most of my day in. On my Macs, I'm using and loving NetNewswire.
Most of those that responded asked (after wondering what an RSS feed was) what an RSS feed would be good for. How, they asked, would journalists use them. Here's what I said:
- An RSS feed would cut down on spam and unwanted e-mail. For the publisher: An RSS feed would reduce the administrative overhead of an e-mail delivery (fewer bouncebacks and list admin garbage).
- Because most RSS feeds include just a quick summary of an item, it means I can use a newsreader to get a quick summary of a release rather than have to read the whole release.
- Also: Because RSS feeds requires publishers to adhere to certain standards in terms of describing the information, I won't get e-mailed press releases that simply have a subject line: "Press release from X" Using an RSS feed (I hope) would force people to write better and more succinct descriptions of what is actually news.
- Finally: Because some RSS feeds can now be accessed via the Web (Yahoo has just added this capability to its configurable sites), it means I can get news releases from any Web-enabled client and just a machine that has an e-mail client that can tie into my Exchange server or POP account.
William Gibson quits the blogosphere
But the good news is: It's because he wants to write more books. From Gibson's blog:
LAST POSTCARD FROM COSTA DEL BLOG
Time for me to get back to my day job, which means that it’s time for me to stop blogging.
I’ve found blogging to be a low-impact activity, mildly narcotic and mostly quite convivial, but the thing I’ve most enjoyed about it is how it never fails to underline the fact that if I’m doing this I’m definitely not writing a novel – that is, if I’m still blogging, I’m definitely still on vacation. I’ve always known, somehow, that it would get in the way of writing fiction, and that I wouldn’t want to be trying to do both at once. .... more at: [Gibson Blog]
