Friday Feature: Enhancing Your Newsroom Media Gallery
What makes an online newsroom compelling yet easy to navigate? How should a brand position its content to reach the desired audience? Which categories would journalists prefer when searching for material?
At TheNewsMarket, we answer questions like these nearly every day from existing and prospective clients. So we decided to launch a regular Friday feature where we share advice on essential newsroom functions and tips. As our editorial director explained in a previous post, newsrooms are valuable ‘online real estate’, showcasing a company’s latest announcements, reports and analysis, and multimedia assets. In this edition, I’ll focus on the latter and run through ways to maximise your media library.
From TV correspondents to trade magazine reporters, all journalists care about the visual elements of their story. Some might want a few glossy images for an article, while others might need several minutes of clean video footage for a digital piece. Make sure your company’s multimedia resources are accessible and signposted clearly. We recommend separating images from videos to avoid confusing any time-pressed users.
A great template to follow is Kia. The South Korean carmaker has a wealth of images, videos and press kits of its vehicles but the layout remains simple and intuitive. For instance, when your cursor hovers over a thumbnail in the video library, the title of the clip appears and you have the option to watch the embedded video in the same window (there are no fiddly pop-ups or unexpected jumps to external media players). If the video fits the bill, you can click the download button. It’s a quick and painless one-step process.
Another favourite of ours is adidas. The sports giant includes media assets alongside each of its press releases and stories. Users can download all the high-quality material as a single zip file, or add everything to their media cart to download later on, or select individual images and choose the hi-res or low-res versions. There’s also a brief note to inform journalists about the rights and restrictions of the assets. This design allows adidas to positively influence how its brand and products are presented.
Since journalists serve different platforms, it’s absolutely vital to provide the size and format of the images and videos. Better still, give them choices where possible: 1080p or 720p HD, mov or mp4, wav or mp3, jpeg or png etc. The last thing you want is for a digital editor to abandon a snappy Twitter infographic on your company news because they could only find a mega 4K video file.
If you would like more suggestions on how to construct or revamp your online newsrooms, please get in touch on our contact page or follow us on LinkedIn.
