Press release distribution agency PR Newswire and blog search engine Technorati have signed a deal to put a Technorati button into press releases distributed through the PR Newswire services.
So what? you may well ask. Well, it will apparently allow companies to very swiftly measure the impact of any release because any links to them in the blogosphere will be catalogued automatically. Compare this to what you might do using Google — “link: twopointouch.com/some_article_page” doesn’t produce the results chronologically and can’t follow email or RSS distribution. It’s similar to embedding an RFID chip into a press release. You can tell where it is at all times. No-one’s mentioned it, but it seems very much like a competing service to Technorati’s other big PR deal over the last couple of months, Edelman’s Story-Maker-Upper Social Media Release engine.
I’m not an enormous fan of either Technorati or PR Newswire, to be honest, but I think this is a great move. It’s strange: I was talking to Mike Butcher just the other day and we were discussing how citizen journalism has made professional journalism a lot tougher than it was in the days of print. Cut-and-paste from a press release and change a few words? (You know you’ve been there, old school hacks). Busted in seconds thanks to this sort of service. Great stuff. Now you have to do proper reporting and phone the guy up. And the other guy who disagrees with him. And then write your copy from scratch. It’s good news for journalism as a profession. The upshot is that the public get better news. You can turn round to your publisher or editor and say, “I need an original take on this story — otherwise it’s useless”. In an era where the production of ‘content’ is viewed as easy and cheap by many publishers, and where civilians are producing stuff that’s just as good (and better) than many of the pros, I’m hoping that the production of valuable content starts to become recognised once more as time-consuming, tricky and requiring a certain amount of training and skill. There is no longer any way to ‘fake it’.
In a deeply ironic twist, PRNewswire.com uses frames and so I can’t directly link to their press release. (doh!) Consequently, I’ve cut and pasted it below. ;)
NEW YORK, Jan. 15 /PRNewswire/ — PR Newswire, the global leader in commercial news distribution, and Technorati, the authority for citizen media, today announced that for the first time readers of press releases can track online conversations in the blogosphere directly from press releases on http://www.prnewswire.com/.
This marks the first time Technorati has entered into a partnership with a commercial news distribution company, and will help to establish a strong link between two of the most important tools in the communications mix — announcements via press releases and reactions from bloggers.
All individual press releases distributed through PR Newswire will now include a ‘Technorati’ button, linking readers to a search result page hosted by Technorati that will display a list of blogs discussing and linking to the news release, and relevant excerpts from those blogs. Once on the search result page, the reader can set up an automatic watch list on Technorati to notify them when any new blog posts are published.
“Press releases have the power to initiate and inform important conversations in the blogosphere, while many bloggers are great accelerators and influencers of public conversation and opinion,” said Dave Armon, chief operating officer of PR Newswire. “This partnership joins together two leaders in the communications industry to offer an unparalleled service to both issuers of news and the readers who follow them. Issuers now have a means to track direct blog response to their press release using the most established and innovative blog search facility available, while readers of these news releases will gain broader context for the news by reading how these public influencers are responding to it.”
The Technorati link is available when viewing press releases from PR Newswire’s public Web site, http://www.prnewswire.com/, which receives more than 1.2 million unique visitors a month. All PR Newswire releases will carry the Technorati link at no additional cost. Technorati is a free service, requiring only registration by users.
“Often, the kernel of any robust conversation on the Live Web is a press release in which something significant or interesting is announced,” said David L. Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati. “By using the new Technorati button on PR Newswire, folks can instantly see both immediate reaction to announcements and the accelerating conversation, all in real time.”
Visitors to any press release on PR Newswire’s public Web site can also access RSS feeds of press releases categorized by industry and subject, and post press releases to both del.icio.us and digg, two influential social networks.
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I agree with your conclusions on how this can help in the quest for better journalism both from professionals and amateurs.
It seems also that the “bandwidth” of an article can be measured using this approach. The traceability tree that is drawn from the article can show how far the article has traveled.