Brands Need a New Type of Newsroom

A brand newsroom should not be a pit where journalists and creative producers are thrown until they figure out a way to hijack an event and make a piece of content go viral. Brands need to pursue more than a one-night stand with content and move toward sustaining a voice across multiple platforms, with multiple storylines and creative bursts that pull in divergent audiences. We need to move beyond marketing moments to continuous publishing and broadcasting. And as soon as a brand moves in this direction, the conversation will shift from how content gets generated and how audiences are targeted to operational support and infrastructure that sustain and propel growth.

Not everyone agrees brands need newsrooms, but many in marketing and journalism often still think in linear ways. Too many people come to the table with preconceived notions of what a newsroom does or should do.

In order to deal with the 24-hour pressure of publishing, brands have turned to media companies and agencies for help. In theory, a media company seems like the best place for a brand to go in order to earn ongoing publishing support. But as they are today, media companies can’t run brand newsrooms in a way a brand would want. A media organization’s creative output is typically no more original than a paperclip in a pile, and there is often far too much disagreement within the editorial rank-and-file on how content should be labeled. The advertorial has been renamed native advertising, highlighting how confused and desperate the journalism industry has become in an effort to figure out what it wants to be when it grows up in the digital era.

Traditional media companies also can’t produce branded content because creativity is precious; news is not. Journalists tell stories, while marketers need to meet KPIs. Add to that the need to maintain the design and creative expression of brand, and many traditional media organizations are quickly in over their heads.

The other option is agency-land. But that quickly gets bogged down by anachronistic campaign flights and war rooms, where single pieces of content are created at events. Agency copywriters take days to write what a seasoned journalist would produce in a matter of hours, and they don’t process data and editorial insights in the same way a journalist would.

Neither media companies nor agencies truly solve a brand’s core challenges around continuous publishing because they’re built to sell a specific product or service rather than pursue innovation. Both groups need to stop asking what they can sell to a brand and instead ask the question any entrepreneur would: What is the problem you are trying to solve?

From the brand perspective, the problem starts with 24-hour pressure to communicate and manage audiences at scale. That gets complicated when you throw in real-time competitive pressure and multiply it by distinct demographics and multiple geographies. And it‘s nearly impossible to manage using conventional means when you are a brand with multiple product lines.

A proper brand newsroom would allow for continuous publishing or broadcasting support. It would allow marketers to create branded experiences that blend journalists’ storytelling and audience-growing skills with analysts’ knowledge and insight and with the commercial inclination of marketers. It would be a living entity that responds to events of the world in real-time but also drive discussion and new conversations. The brand newsroom output would be a cross between a news and magazine experience, but real-time and creatively driven.

The content marketing space is turning into a crowded bus full of service providers, technology companies, agencies, media organizations and startups. Clarity has yet to emerge, and brands have yet to figure out what to build or buy. This situation is not very different than what brands went through as they contended with the evolutions of Web 1.0 and 2.0.

Like the media companies before them, brands now have to pick their path to a scalable and sustainable solution. If 2012 was the year brands became publishers, 2013 is when brands will come to terms with a new type of newsroom.

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