Are newswires working hard enough to find the right target audiences? Marino Donati reports

As the internet continues to revolutionise the way people consume information, more news is available to more people, more quickly than ever before. The challenge for newswires and news distributors is to ensure the right information gets to the right people.

Marketwire covers news from sectors as diverse as financial services, oil and gas, arts and entertainment, media and communications. Clients range from PR practitioners, IR professionals and the media.

Director of sales UK, Roy Jacques, says Marketwire is highly accurate at targeting information: “Much of that comes down to our media relations and research teams who keep current media contacts and financial analysts who are already in our system, and work to identify new channels that our clients can target.”

However he adds that the pace of change brings challenges: “While for traditional media outlets, it’s becoming easier for us to identify and keep current the important contacts working there, it can be more difficult to stay on top of social media, where bloggers and new influencers are appearing, as well as to identify media contacts in emerging markets.”

PR Newswire’s clients include PRs operating in the healthcare, technologies, and corporate communications sectors, among others. The free online PR Newswire is used by accredited journalists with 110,000 active users globally.

Director of marketing and multimedia EMEA Samantha Proctor says the company invests a lot of resources into its media relations team to make sure news is targeted properly.

“There are eight people in the team with different teams across Europe,” she says. “They help build relationships and networks with websites and journalists across different regions, and they speak different languages.”

However, some believe many traditional newswires are not good enough at hitting specifc audiences. Andrew Girdwood, head of strategy at Brinkwire, says: “The future is with the modern type of technologysavvy person who knows how to subscribe. Promoting a press release is quite easy, and there are some newswires that accept any news, put tags on it for Google and get as many hits as possible. But if you want an influential blogger to use it, you have to build up your relationship. Of course, with some newswires you pay more to target specific audience and that’s invaluable for those people.”

He adds: “Let’s not just think about blasting out news, but making journalists and bloggers aware of it. We’re not a PR firm trying to represent the story. We put the news out there into the conversation.”

Realwire CEO Adam Parker says that, by their own measure, many newswire-type services are not that good at surgically picking out specific audiences. He is launching a campaign to encourage the media industry in general to rethink attitudes to press releases.

“All newswires get visibility,” he says. “But given what they charge it’s not enough. Surveys have shown many press releases are irrelevant. The fundamental thing is to send to people who give you permission, read the publication in detail before you send it, don’t just categorise a release as ‘technology’ for example – it’s a huge field – format correctly and monitor who looks at it.”

However, targeting audiences with news should not happen at the expense of breadth of distribution, according to Thomas Naysmith, MD of M2 Communications. It is used by small and mediumsized businesses and PR agencies looking for a way to gain coverage. For a fee, they can have unlimited press releases sent out by M2 to the larger news aggregators.

Naysmith says: “Certain PR agencies don’t believe in wide press release distribution, they think it will ruin the message, it’s all about targeting. Why? Do they think their news will offend people by being out there? Users won’t find it if they’re not interested in it. I don’t want to take away from targeting but in some cases the PR agencies are not getting news onto aggregators. If that doesn’t happen you’ve really failed.”

Some newswires’ whole concept is focused around specialisation. BioPortfolio acts as a portal for news in the life science and healthcare sectors. With a powerful search engine and database, the service gives users personalised pages where they can sign up to specific news topics via mail alerts or an RSS feed. Newspress, meanwhile, reaches a global audience of automotive specialists, sending emails to a bespoke database of 40,000 and providing a secure website for journalists.

Other news distributors are focusing on how readiness to go online is impacting communication. Kristjan Hauksson, owner, Nordic eMarketing, which operates eNewsWires, says: “The internet is surpassing publications and trade shows as the first stop to gather information; the higher you go the more things like Google are used. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it in the old fashioned way, sending releases to news desks, but help users have as wide access as possible. Think about how people search, and the difference between reading on screen and on paper.”

Control of where news gets distributed, and monitoring what happens to it, is vital. Sophie Shiatis, VP of e-commerce at PR Web, says: “Clients can select the categories and the industry, region and specific publications they want news to go to. We have analytics software, so clients can see what publications the news has gone to, how many times someone has read, printed, shared and twittered the news.” Media intelligence firm Cision offers targeted distribution via its integrated CisionPoint software.

“It allows measurable distribution across a range of channels - niche media lists, newswires and CisionWire,” says head of digital strategy Paul Miller. “CisionWire is literally a collection of heavily, and locally, search-optimised websites. When content is pushed through the wires, the CisionPoint user has an option to tag and publish to local and international CisionWire sites. While CisionWire can be thought of as a mass distribution channel, visitors head to very specific pages - those that match their search request in their local language. Even for those on the homepage there is increasingly granular navigation available.”

The Dow Jones newswire provides global real time news and analysis for financial directors and professionals in 11 languages. News is delivered at high speed with everything from news stories to features. Marcus Wright, editor newswires EMEA, says that monitoring its effectiveness is relatively straightforward. “We would hear pretty quickly if we were providing the wrong information or news,” he says. “Our users don’t have the time to sift through information that may not be relevant. We are serving financial professionals, who make investment and trading decisions and are willing to pay for high quality information. A big focus now is not just news packages but analysis and commentary. Especially through the financial crisis.”

But new technology is creating new challenges for the communications industry, as new formats for consuming news are becoming more common.

“The amount and format of information and rich, multimedia content that a communicator can include in a news release today is really astonishing,” says Jacques at Marketwire. “High resolution photos, embedded video, financial tables, hyperlinks, audio. Social media is a challenge and it’s important we stay on top of these shifts in the media landscape so our clients can reach the influencers they need to reach.”

At PR Newswire, Proctor predicts that more specific and niche websites hosting multimedia content will be created. She says: “The challenge we will have as aggregators is tying in with these new websites, making sure we are taking content to the right place. The right content will become more complex, but more beneficial to the user.”