DWPub Sporadic

National newspapers confess to digital shortcomings

The New Media Knowledge (NMK) ‘What Happens to Newspapers?’ event last night was an almost spiritual experience, not least because of the vaulted venue provided by Lansons Communications. Listening to a load of national newspapers admit they’d been ‘playing catch up for years’ and promising to be ‘faster and more radical’ was a bit like gate-crashing a mass Fleet Street confessional

The panel was an impressive line-up – guardian.co.uk’s head of editorial development Neil Mcintosh, Telegraph Media Group assistant editor Justin Williams, Retail Week online editor Martin Stabe, The Journalist editor Tim Gopsill and Northcliffe Media director of digital publishing Mike Rowley. It was fascinating to listen to the newspaper bunch speak of the need for younger, more digital-savvy talent and streamlining the editing process to boost content volume and reduce cost.

My only criticism of the event was that the panel was entirely dominated by ‘old media’. It would have triggered a much more dynamic debate if there was some representation from professional bloggers or founders of successful online community sites – the ‘new media’ that is really challenging the old.

Tags: NMK-newspapers

Find PR resources more easily with new site

It’s now easier to find useful media relations resources on our main www.dwpub.com website thanks to a comprehensive redesign.

The objective was to make it simpler for our customers, prospective customers and the many thousands of journalists who use our services to discover the full range of things we offer - including free PR whitepapers and videos.

We’ve found ourselves at the centre of the journalism and PR communities by providing effective, easy-to-use services that benefit journalists and provide real value for PR professionals. But I often find that many people are unaware of the full range of things we do.
 
Take a look at our new site and you might find we can help you in more ways than you realised.

Press release wire breaks another record

Our Response Source/SourceWire Press Release Wire broke another record last month, with the greatest number of releases distributed ever.
This reflects an increasing appreciation among communications professionals that getting press releases visible on the internet is as important as reaching out to relevant journalists. Both of these objectives are achieved with the Response Source/SourceWire Press Release Wire as releases appear on our search-optimised sites as well as being distributed to journalists and newsdesks by email.
We've also redesigned the send press release page, making it more intuitive so it's easier than ever to post releases. For more information check out our press release wire section on our new site or contact Gemma at gemma@dwpub.com or call 0845 370 7777.

Keeping up with us online

When I started the company back in 1997 it was pretty easy keeping our small but fast-growing community of clients informed of what we were up to. But now we have well in excess of 2,500 different companies using our services it does present me with somewhat of a communications challenge.

I’ve found social media is a very useful way to communicate. It gives people more choice over how information is received - and as it’s ‘conversational’ you can give feedback too.

All the stories from the email version of the DWPub Sporadic plus additional postings about the media industry or what we’re up to appear on this blog, so it’s a great idea to follow it (check out the RSS feed - here’s help on RSS if you need it).

Here is a list of how you can follow us online:

My blog, the DWPub Sporadic (RSS)
My Twitter account (links to my blog postings appear here)
The DWPub Facebook Group
The FeaturesExec ‘what’s new’ page

And if you want help but don’t want to call or email, try our live help function on the new site - go to www.dwpub.com and click on the ‘live help’ logo.

Tech PR quiz breaks record

There were a record-breaking 14 teams at the CIPR SET group quiz tonight, probably twice the size of previous events. I think it's the third or fourth time we've sponsored the event and its always a good one.

I joined a team from ITPR, though I didn't help much - I think we came third from last or something.

Among the other teams was one from Hotwire PR. They didn't win but they were probably the noisiest! They professed to being big fans of FeaturesExec, so I couldn't resist including a pic here. From left to right are Karen, Tim, Morgan, Claire and Claudia (Claudia works for Hotwire sister agency Skywrite Communications).

Fab new dwpub.com site

I know website redesigns are not that big a deal but I must say I am very happy with the all-new design of our www.dwpub.com site.

The whole objective was to make it easier to find out what we do and how we do it, from the perspective of new and existing public relations customers and the thousands of journalists who benefit from our services. It fits in much better with our marketing too.

One of the biggest changes was to the submit form for our press release wire. We've had lots of positive feedback that the new form is very intuitive.

Anyway, check it out. I hope you like it as much as I do!

Apology for incorrectly addressed mailshot

We screwed up today. One of our regular direct mail shots has gone out with names and surnames mixed up for some recipients. (See my comment below for an update.)

Before I say anything else, I just want to say a very big sorry to those who have received the mailing with incorrect names on. I get frustrated when people spell my name wrong, so it must be really annoying to get a mailing with a totally wrong first name (and wrong salutation in some cases).

We use mailing data from a number of respected sources in the PR industry and the mail merge and fulfillment is handled by a third-party mailing house. It looks on the face of it that something has gone wrong during the mail merge. I appreciate this kind of mistake looks really shoddy and I'm determined to get to the bottom of it to make sure it doesn't happen again, but one thing I can say for sure is that this does not reflect the quality of our media database or other services we provide.

I'm really sorry about this and I'd like to extend my sincerest apologies to anyone who received incorrectly addressed items from us in this mailing.

See my comment below for an update on what went wrong. Oh, and thanks to Ellie for bringing this to my attention.