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Why every business needs a journalist

Posted Monday, January 23rd, 2012 by Angela Ward

Content is king – but is that the end of the story? Today, with the rise and rise of social media, coupled with a focus on improving a website’s SEO, every business should be producing content on a regular basis.

But, importantly, it needs to be good content – informative, insightful and well written. Even if you’ve got a fantastic idea to share, if the copy is poorly written or full of mistakes, readers will soon stop reading.

Today, people are beginning to rely on social media as their primary source of information. In fact, many people reach for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, before picking up a daily newspaper.

Twitter, in particular, is an excellent way of controlling the information that is delivered to your desktop or smart phone. People are becoming more discerning on Twitter and only following people and organisations who regularly deliver good content – whether this be a blogger within their own industry sector or an innovative organisation they want to emulate. Then they mix that up with following key news providers, to ensure they are informed if something major happens in the world at large.

Businesses are now beginning to compete with the media as publishers - with high quality copy and analysis able to build brand names and reputations for those that can deliver it. This doesn’t just have to apply to large organisations. Businesses working on a local level are in just as good a position to achieve this. The key is writing good content and producing it regularly – and this is where organisations are likely to fall down, or simply give up, through a lack of time or skills.

Today, every business needs to have a journalist on hand to report on its achievements and opinions. Journalists are used to writing copy. They understand how articles and other pieces of writing, such as press releases and blogs, should be structured and written.

Journalists are also able to generate copy reasonably quickly - which is useful to business people who are short of time; quite often they know what they want to say, but struggle to get it down on paper and spend ages writing and rewriting.

Utilising the skills of a journalist does not mean that the organisation loses its voice. A good journalist will get to know the company it is writing for first, understand its culture and identify the tone of voice it should use.

Journalists are generally happy to edit copy sent their way or, alternatively, start from scratch by interviewing the business expert over the telephone or simply getting them to email through some bullet points. A good journalist will also be proactive, scanning the media, offline and online, to see where the opportunities are for their client to comment or respond.

So, it’s not content that is king – there’s plenty of that about - it’s good content which makes the difference.

Posted Monday, January 23rd, 2012 by Angela Ward

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