SAC9: A Day in the (Online) Life of a Humble News Release

[Intro Music]

Announcer: You’re listening to one in a series of presentations from the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference in Springfield, Missouri.

Lori Packer: I'm Lori Packer. I'm the web editor in the University Communications Office at the University of Rochester. And today, I want to talk about some things that we’ve started doing with our press releases. I usually work humble, kind of, very specifically in this presentation because it is the Humble Press Release. The tool that the folks in our office that I work for use every day as sort of their bread and butter tool that they used every day to get their job done.

So first, I want to tell you a little bit about –you’ve all are just been given a context. University of Rochester is a research university in upstate New York. It’s fairly small, I would say, for a research university, sort of, compared to the dogs we try to run with. We have 4800 undergraduates. We’re very decentralized. 1I used to think uniquely so until I started going to these kinds of conferences and decentralization is kind of the rule.

We have a main, sort of, a core undergraduate school that interestingly no one can really decide what it’s called. Some people call it The College. Some people call it The College of Arts and Sciences, some people call it The College of Arts, Sciences and Engineering. So it makes life interesting to talk about.

We also have a business school. We have a very well-regarded music school. We have a medical school, a nursing school, education school, and a huge medical center; massive medical center with about 17,000 employees. Sometimes people describe us as a college staple to the side of a medical center which is sometimes how it feels.

And about public relations at the University of Rochester, to go along with that decentralized theme, every one of those six schools has its own PR operation. They all have a separate public relations office.

Where I work, University of Communications covers this college entity; the main kind of undergraduate core of the university, and the central administration, so we cover the President’s Office and any kind of institutional news that comes from that body. And in our shop, there are currently about 29 of us. We have a couple of open position. But we’re divided into three areas. They call them the three Ps, actually, because it’s publications, periodicals and publicity, otherwise known as media relations.

The publications folks are the people that do our public materials. They do our alumni magazine, they do our faculty staff newsletter, they’re also doing our e-Newsletters. The periodicals folks are – actually, I told that – the publications folks are the folks that do our print work for other clients so they do the admissions materials posters, invitations. Periodicals are our alumni magazine and our internal publications. And then media relations are our publicists; the people who do the writing of these news releases as a daily part of their job.

So where do I fit in to all of these? I mentioned at the beginning that my title is web editor, and what the heck is a web editor. In those three groups that I mentioned, periodicals, publicity, and publications, I’m the only in the office who doesn’t belong to any of those groups. When our administrative assistant prints out the new phone list, she color-codes them to see which persons and which group, and I have a color all to myself. I think I’m purple. I just had to hang out by myself.

Because I kind of work with all of the different groups, and if someone in my office had to describe or introduce me to somebody else, they would say, “Oh, she does our web stuff. She’s our web person. She puts things on the web. Can you put this on the web for me?” So that’s my role in that office.

Are there folks here that are, sort of, following that publicity area where you’re doing the writing and the news releases and talking to media or doing media relations, or just media relations work? And are there folks that are like me who are, sort of, working with those people and aren’t doing the writing and helping them get that material, I don’t know what happens, different ways? Alright, cool. Perfect group.

So what I want to do today is talk really about two specific case studies from our recent experiences at our university, and I hope make some general points from those specific studies that you can cling something from.
Press releases in the beginning, in the old days, press releases were and are material that people write, that writers write, and then distribute on letterhead with printers, with copiers, fax machines, typewriters; that’s not me.

Our lead science writer tells a great story. He started working in our office in about 2000. Before that, he worked at the medical center. And the only way they were allowed, or the method they had at distributing press releases besides mail, was fax. And he’s sending out national pictures. He’s writing releases about major vaccines and medical discoveries, and he’s sending them out to sometimes 200 reporters depending on the story.

And he would go to his administrative assistant with a sort of sheepish grin on his face to tell her to fax 200 news releases. And the fax machine would be tied up for six hours because it was 1999. It was before you could just auto scan and send things out. And they had a person there that was a big part of her job was the manual distribution of press release. They didn’t actually start emailing news releases until like 2001 or 2002 or something crazy.

So was does that Humble Press Release do? What is the point of that Humble Press Release? A traditional job of that tool that publicists use is to serve as a source material for journalists; that’s fodder for journalists. You are using a news release to tell your story to a reporter, who then goes out and tells his or her story to his audience or not.

You don’t have much control over what they do or that you can influence it. And they do have a limited shelf life. There’s a story, you write about a story, something great, someone in your university is doing in a way that you want it to be interesting to a reporter, if they don’t pick it up, it’s gone and it’s done.

But that changes a little bit when the Humble News Release gets a life online. You still have that traditional role of using a news release as a way of communicating to a very specific audience, media, journalist, reporters. But online, the press release, there’s an opportunity, I think, for the press release to become the story; just sort of cut out the middle and have more of an unlimited shelf life.

Even though the story may be over, even though it wasn’t picked up anywhere, you can continue to reference that, user is online, and drive people to it without relying on the guy with the scoop hat to tell your story for you. You can have a little bit more direct control over how that story’s packaged and how people get to it.

So here, I want to talk about a couple of very specific examples that were recent examples from our office; some things that I thought were interesting little stories of how a press release might shift online.

So we had this story and this professor who, in May 2006, did an experiment where he actually made light go so fast that it traveled backwards. The light passes through a fiber that was coated with a chemical and it was traveling so fast that it actually skipped one into the filter before it entered it. I don’t understand it either, very cool. Definitely fell under the way cool science story category.

So let me bring up that press release…or try to. So here’s how that press release looked and still looks online from May 2006. It looks very traditional, right? We’ve got a letterhead and it purposely looks like our printed releases. We have a different letterhead online or different template for our new releases to match our print. We’ve got our contact information.

We’ve got this new, sort of, social toolbar that we added. It’s very basic. You can email it, you can print it, you can subscribe to the feed that this release is published to. In this case, it would be like the Science and Technology feed. You can add it to Delicious, you can add it to Google, you can submit it to Digg. My animation is not loading but that’s okay.

The cool thing we were able to do for this release was we had the luxury of time. Jonathan Sherwood, our science writer who tells the story about the 200 faxes, he had the luxury of time with this release because something to do with the publication schedule. And when this particular professor was going to a conference, he had a little bit of knowledge about when he could publish this out.

And the faculty member in question had a little animation of this effect. The thing that I just described to you is very cool but also very difficult, at least for me and maybe for reporters, to grasp. So this professor had had in his research paper a little animation that showed this working. And he didn’t think, the professor didn’t think, it was worth anything to us.

He included it as a sort of wonky little chart that showed the pattern of light going through this filter. And Jonathan looked at it and thought, “That’s awesome. I need to get that. How can I get that?” And he had it imbedded in some weird PDF format – he had the video imbedded in a PDF which I’d never seen before, so I had to do like a little screen capture to just get that video off the PDF and save it as a traditional MPEG file to put it up here. And it should be right there but it’s not loading. If you’ve got a laptop, it loads online. But there’s something going on there. It’s just flash.

The question was how long have we been adding these little bugs? We started doing that – this is May 2006, so the semester before fall; that academic year so Fall 2005. And it still looks exactly like that.

Oh, okay. I’ll try to copy that real quickly. Our video may work in a different browser. This is our office’s newsroom, by the way. Yes? Yes. The question was about that little making headlines box. I can talk a little bit more about how we actually publish our releases but our system has – that’s where we answer our clips, our hits. And if there is a hit that is associated with a particular press release, you can make that association in that system and you can choose whether or not to display it on the release itself.

We also have in the Headline Section in our newsroom that this list hits that we, editorially, think are cool or interesting on our site. So there’s the little animation that shows red lines moving across the square, basically, is what it shows. Ostensibly it shows how the light travels backward. So, as I was saying, Jonathan had the benefit of time with this and we were able to sort of create a complete package, as I hope you saw on the release, where we had an animation showing that effect.

Our illustrator, we have an illustrator in our publications unit, who created an EPS illustration that the reporters could download to sort of show the same effect. And we also had eye resolution photos of the guy. It kind of helps Professor Boyd looks like Professor Boyd. He looks like he stepped out of Mr. Wizard. And he’s awesome. He’s great. He talks to reporters and he’s one of those great faculty who kind of gets it and enjoys that aspect of his job.

So what happened? Jonathan’s news release was picked up in the New York Times. It was on the front page of their Science Daily section, success. That’s what our publicists want. They want the big national hit that they can clip out and photocopy and put in the morgue and keep and show everyone that they did their job.

And two to three years ago, that would’ve been the end of the story. But wait, there’s more. It doesn’t end there anymore. The New York Times published the story online. And in their version of the story, they linked back to our press release. They linked back to our press release because of the animation. That link is saying, “See an animation of this effect.” And that link goes directly back to our press release.

And I think that’s fairly rare. Most journalists don’t like to acknowledge the fact that they’re getting information from an external source. They are reporters. They are going out and finding out themselves. So they try to ignore the fact that there is a PR for a PR operation behind them showing them stuff. So the fact that they actually pointed to us and credited us and sent traffic back to our site was fairly interesting.

So, as a result of that, we got picked up at the New York Times. That one release, that one news release, got over 101,000 hits on our site in one month. And in our site, a good traffic. So one release is maybe over 1000, like 1100, 1200. We got maybe four or five a month that rise to that level. We had one that had over 100,000 in May 2006. Only about 12000 which, again, it’s still huge because good traffic is about 1100, only about 12000 of those hits came directly from that New York Times story.

But we did learn some lessons from this particular case study. One was that if you give them a package, something that – if you’re useful, if you give them something that they can’t get from anywhere else, you become the experts. You become the provider of stuff that your audience, in this case, journalists can’t get anywhere else. You will be rewarded for doing that.

I wanted to make a point that the idea of the gift that keeps on giving. I talked about press releases having traditionally short shelf life. This release was published in May 2006. It got over 101,000 hits that one month. Over its entire life, it’s gotten 180,000 hits. And every month, it’s almost always in the top 10 of most traffic releases to our site even though the story is over.

Robert Boyd, he’s still doing his research but that story is over in terms of news value. But in terms of a way to tell our story as University of Rochester to more and more people, it still has value and a life online.

So that’s the idea that I call the gift that keeps on giving. When you put your news release online, it can continue to reward you in terms of a vehicle to tell your story to your audiences. And the main point for me for this was that we talked about all these things in news media, social media, how to get news releases, and your news generally out to these other sources. The mainstream is still matter. Despite readership figures going down there and no one acknowledges that they are, they’re still a very important driver of content to other things.

If you are on the front page of the science section of New York Times, that’s still valuable. That’s still very important. And they still drive content and, sort of, set the agenda for this other sites. Those are the hits that we’re still getting. Some of them are coming from that New York Times story because it’s archive.

But a lot of them are coming from just Digg and Slashdot and random blogs that every now and again find it. And that I think, sort of, driven by the fact that it had that New York Times validation on it at some point in its life.

The mainstream media still matter but there is this other chunk of stuff going on under social media that’s different than what most folks who have been doing PR for a while maybe used to doing. I think they’re a little bit hard to, sort of, find your feet in that whole realm. This story, I think, gets to that point. What do we do with social media and how does social media drive what we do?

I’m not going to click on this release because it’s not as visually interesting as the first one. But this was a more recent one from August. We had a physicist who – he had a theory that you could unmeasure a quantum particle. Because apparently, when you measure a quantum particle, bad stuff happens. And you could unmeasure it or you could weekly unmeasure it so that it would un-collapse itself.

This was his theory. And another scientist, I believe from Berkeley, did a – to acknowledge the UC Berkeley audience members – did an experiment that basically validated or supported our professor’s theory. Again, I know absolutely nothing about that except the fact that it’s way cool science guy and Jonathan got very excited when this happened.

And this release was very different. There’s no video. I don’t know how you do a video of a quantum particle uncollapsing. There’s no animation, there’s no graphic element, and there were no big media hits for this release.

It was a hard story to tell. It’s a hard story to explain. It wasn’t our guy doing the research. It was another guy doing research that was about our guys’ initial theory. So it wasn’t as obvious as slum dunk as Robert Boyd’s backwards light story. And it didn’t get picked up anywhere, really.

And again, that would’ve been the end of the story. Jonathan would’ve went, “Oh, I tried. Professor wanted me to pitch it, I pitched it. Oh, well, it didn’t get picked up.” But this release in its first month got 72,000 hits online. So we’re trying to figure out why. And this one was really interesting. I can sort of tell you what happened and how it happened. I’ve no idea why it happened.

So the why is kind of really an interesting question and I don’t really know how to answer it. But you can sort of follow the traffic and sort of see what was the life of this release when it was first put out there. It was published on August 4th to our news site. On August 5th, it got 11 hits, all from UR people; probably Jonathan and his boss, and the faculty member looking at it.

And then he does this thing. He sends it out to whatever sources he uses as a science writer to distribute his press releases online. The following day, on the 6th – and one day, it got 1700 hits; almost all of them from Reddit, the social bookmarking site.

The following day, it got 11,000 hits from Digg. Reddit traffic fell off to about 700. And it also got picked up in a couple of interesting blogs. It got picked up by RichardDawkins.net. I don’t know if there’s some interesting -- this sort of atheist community -- around quantum mechanics. No idea. But a couple of interesting blogs picked it up.

And then the following day, the Digg traffic falls off and it’s got 10,000 hits. Now it’s StumbleUpon’s turn. It got 10,000 hits from StumbleUpon. So you can sort of see each one kind of tailing off and picking up from the other. Again, I don’t know why. I don’t know Reddit. I don’t know why Reddit was first and Digg was second, and StumbleUpon was next. But I do kind of see happened. And it was just an interesting to be able to follow something and, sort of, see it in progress.

So how do I know what happened. Some interesting tools of the trade. How many people use Google Analytics on your news sites? Google Analytics is a great tool. If we have some time I can show you a little bit about this specific report. But it allows you to track individual news releases individually depending on how you set it up, of course, but it’s a possibility. You can track how people are getting to a particular release, where they’re coming from, how long they’re staying over that – figure’s supposed to be a little bit squishy.

Your track number of hits in national publications is one. This could be another that sort of shows – there’s this whole avenue that just hold their way of telling our stories. That maybe if you’re doing PR for a while, you don’t value as much as the traditional methods that are still important. But they are out there and you can’t ignore them. And Google Analytics is a great way to get to that kind of stuff.

We also have some newer sources of traffic. Some people or names to be aware of that are driving other people to your site to read your stories, basically. StumbleUpon is kind of huge for us. We get just thousands of hits from StumbleUpon everyday. We don’t sit around submitting our own stuff to StumbleUpon or any of these sites. We’re not trying to game the system. We are aware of them and want to participate in them, but we don’t want to be the goose that killed the golden egg. We just want to understand what’s happening or try to understand what’s happening, and hopefully benefit from it.

It’s a little bit of a virtuous circle. I don’t know. Maybe that’s a thing for discussion. I don’t know what the ethics behind digging yourself would be. I know we don’t do that. But there these other sites out there like Digg and Reddit and StumbleUpon in particular that really, if you just look under the hood of Google Analytics and see who’s coming in specific sites, those names just come up over and over again.

I have a little bit time, actually. So does anyone want to see the Google Analytics report that kind of drives this? Or also, does anyone have any questions? I saw one in the back. The kitty cat’s coming back, I promise. Those are my last slide though. Did I kill the computer?

So Google Analytics is a great tool. If some of you were in the EPS session that was before this one, he talked a little bit about some of the advanced techniques. I was in there. Some of the ideas are kind of neat. We don’t do advanced stuff.

You basically set up an account at Google Analytics and it gives you a little piece of java code that you have to put on every page that you want to monitor. And in our case, because we will use this little CMS that basically publishes our news releases, it’s all PHP.

So we had one common PHP page that dynamically loads all our releases. So we only had to add this little bit java script code to one page. We didn’t have to add it to every release we publish or thousands of releases from the past. So by adding that one little piece of code, it showed up on all the releases we’ve ever published online going back to 1999 which is when we started putting releases online.

Absolutely. We leave them up basically. Every release we’ve ever published online is still there. We have an archive so they fall off the recent release history so you search – the archives has years, you can search by year, and categories. But they are available online. They show up in Google search results all the time, every now and again. And it might come up here.

But every now and again, you get a release its like, “Alright, that was from 2003. Why are people…?” And all of a sudden, like, for two days it’s getting 400 hits a day. I try to sort of who’s the faculty member involved? Is she on the news or something else, and try to figure out why. There’s some blog in Germany, find something and drive people to it, and that results in a couple of hundred hits. But it happens all the time. You just see these old releases come back to life.

So once you created an account on Google, you can create an account on Google Analytics. If you already have a Google account for yourself or for your institution or for an institutional address, you can sign up for Google Analytics. You can create as many profiles within Google Analytics as you want. So if you want to create a profile that just searches your newsroom and not anything else, I want for our newsroom, our homepage and our calendar are the three kind of profiles that I care about because it’s part of the content, I hope, manage.

And I also do monthly reporting. Kyle and his peers session was talking about how important it is to agree on what you’re tracking. Find things that matter to you, what are the measurings that matter to you, and then set up a regular reporting schedule. So every month, like the second day of the month, I send my monthly report to our whole office. And I try to make it kind of funny. I try to say here’s our top ten releases for the week, and if there’s something goofy or weird, all of a sudden we’re getting traffic from Tel Aviv. What’s up – hello, Tel Aviv. What’s up with that? And trying to sort of point people to interesting little fact points that emerge from the data and sort of keep them interested, which they are.

The great thing about Google Analytics, we have our own server log reports. Our web services guys track all kinds of stuff on the server. But you have to wait until they run the log reports which aren’t right away or aren’t as timely. It’s one of those maintenance tasks that doesn’t happen immediately.

They also check a lot of stuff that they care about and that I don’t care about. I don’t care too much about server load and that kind of stuff. It’s important but that’s not my goal. And one of the reasons I wanted to go to Kyle's talk was because I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff within Google Analytics that you can get out of it that I’m not using because we’re using it in a very interesting but probably basic way.

We’ve been using it for exactly a year. I was looking back in preparing for this presentation. I installed it on October 1st of last year. So we have a year’s worth of data now to fall back on. And that makes kind of interesting because now you can start doing comparisons over a longer span of time.
Does anyone have any questions about other…yeah.

Audience: You said you had some time to prepare for that major story for the New York Times. What would the preparation be to take obviously to work on, getting the extra materials and that sort of thing? What else did you do to prepare for something you knew was going to get a big splash?

Lori Packer: The question was how did we use that time to prepare what we had for that backwards light story. It really started when Jonathan, the writer, saw the original paper, the scientific paper that the professor had written that it had this animation weirdly imbedded in it. And he said if I could make this available to explain this, this will be really useful. How do we do that? And the professor didn’t have – he had a PDF. He didn’t know where the original video came from or how it was created. So I did a very crude kind of screen capture of my screen and recorded that bit of it and then just crapped it to get the video and then save it as an mpeg and embedded it as flash in the release.

Jonathan knew that it had the potential to be a really big story. I don’t know why he had the time. I don’t know sometimes why the academic publishing schedule and embargos and conference papers, that’s kind of not my thing. But I knew that he was excited about the fact that he had about a month before he was going to do his thing, do his pictures.

So he had some time to give our illustrator – our publications folks rarely work with media relations. We’re on two different floors. Sometimes people leave the office and the folks in publication don’t know that they no longer work. It’s kind of bizarre; decentralized even within our own staff.

So he was able to go to my graphic designer and say, “I had this cool scientific topic. I’m trying to figure out a way to illustrate it.” Jonathan’s a writer. He’s not a designer. Mike’s an illustrator so he can come up with this cool thing. We had photos of them already online or are already available.

So here’s our report in Google Analytics. I love the fact that this came from Indiana Jones. That’s so cool from Jeffrey B. This little thing. I’m going to think of Indiana Jones now every time I see this. And you can create a report from any period of time so you can select your date range; if you’re interested in a week, a day, six months, you can do a report for a whole six-month period.

So right here, we have an interesting day on September 17. So if we just wanted to drill down to September 17th, we could do a report. This is September 17th. And then you can do – when this loads up, I’ll show you – you can do reports on individual URL, individual file, for lack of a better word.

So there’s this day. So we had 4600 visits on this day and 7500 page views. Visits are sort of like the – a page use is kind of like a hit the number of things people do while they’re there. The visit is I am one person and I came to your site and I visited your site. While I’m there, I may look at three pages, and those are page views, and then you get pages per visit; which is why the visits figure is bigger. When I do my report, I use page views because I equate that more to hits; really there’s as many hits.

Bounce rate is one of those weird ones that I will admit that I don’t really understand. It’s basically when someone comes to your site and then leaves it immediately without visiting any other pages. And that might be fine for people that are trying to convert this stuff into revenue. I guess if you’re an E-commerce site and you wanted people to travel through your site in a particular way and then buy something. That might be important to you. But if someone comes to my news release so many times and then immediately goes away, that’s fine with me. You don’t have to keep clicking around. I don’t particularly care.

And then once you get down here, you start to see some of the other reports that makes available. So why did we have that weird spike where we’ve got a release right here that had 6000 page used in one day. And this is another release. This is an interesting thing too. We’ve talked about this that all of these stories that we come up with, with cool interesting things happening, nine times out of ten are science stories.

So we have a humanities writer, we have a student life writer, we have a social science writer, and they always are like, “Man, how come I don’t get so many 2000 hits for my social science site?” And I don’t have a good answer for that other than the fact that there’s more repositories for scientific stuff on the web that can then drive traffic amongst themselves and back to you, than there are maybe for some of these other topics.

We have professors doing great work in anthropology, other fields, and sometimes they feel left out but…sorry. So this release, in particular, happens in always about a scientist who created what they’re calling the Rochester Cube, which is the first 3D circuit to do something interesting with involving 3D circuits. And they named it the Rochester Cube which is just kind of cool because they gets our name, Rochester, out there. Again, another faculty member who kind of gets it and he’s willing to collaborate and understands the importance of telling your story and not just doing the academic side of things.

So let’s look at that particular release and you can drill down and see information about that particular story. So this is how he’s able to get that information about how five people came on the first day, and 1700 people came on the second day, and another 1000 the third day, and where they were coming from.

So now, we’re just looking at that one release. And there’s its page views. And now, in this little dropdown, you’ve got all these different things, all these different – what people calls dimensions – you can drill down into for that specific site. It is, like Jeffrey Beam was saying, it can be total overload. You can know so much but it’s hard to know what you need to know. It’s hard to know what’s important and interesting to know. But I like to look at source because that’s telling you where the people who went to that site came from online, not geographically, but online.

So there’s this particular release again. Traffic came from 59 different sources. And the number one, StumbleUpon, more than half; I think that’s one-and-a-half, yes. It came from StumbleUpon.

So that’s a very little bit about Google Analytics. It’s capable of a lot of stuff. If you’ve got a newsroom setup where maybe you have a common template or footer where it’s easy to add that bit of java script code. When you sign up, Google will provide you with that little piece of code and you put it usually at the bottom of your page. And depending on how you started to set up, it will be easier or harder to add. In our case it was easy because of the PHP nature of our site. But again, if you have a common service site include that makes your footer or something, you could drop it in there just as easily. You may have to do some hand copy and pasting.

All of these reports, all of these screens that show all these reports can be exported into a spreadsheet or – I usually make PS, what I call the pre-reports. That’s my monthly report that I send out to our office every month, hence, the monthly report. But it looks a lot nicer than – I used to make reports out of the stuff that the web services guys did and sort of plug in into spreadsheet and try to make something that looked interesting. But this kind, it does that work for you and just makes it a little bit more visually interesting.

So when you start looking through Google Analytics, you start to see this kind of names; StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit. StumbleUpon is cool. It basically builds itself as a tool that lets you discover things you wouldn’t ordinarily discover on the web based on your declared interests and what other people who you’re friends with on StumbleUpon declares their interest.

It’s a toolbar that you actually install in your browser, and then you just hit the StumbleUpon button, and it takes you somewhere; takes you to cool site that you wouldn’t know about yourself.

And when you create your profile, it gives you this laundry-list of topics that you can express an interest in. So if you’re interested in the 2008 election or the Beijing Olympics or something really general like astronomy, it will find sites for you that it thinks matches that. And then when it return stuff, you can say, “That’s not what I wanted,” and degrade it, gives it a thumbs down. And it learns about what you’ve liked and what you didn’t like and then feeds that and sends recommendation engine.

So it’s a recommendation engine basically built in as a toolbar. It’s a really cool way of finding stuff you would never find yourself. How we get picked up on this? Like I said, I don’t know. People are stumbling us and that’s fantastic. Whoever you are, keep doing it. But it’s not something that we try to drive ourselves. We don’t see that as our role in this. It’s kind of a virtuous, wonderful aspect of the Internet that we’re benefiting from. So why monkey with it.

And then Digg and Reddit are similar. They’re not toolbars but they are basically ranked content sites, social bookmarking sites where you dig something. Does Reddit have a verb? What do you do on Reddit?

Alright. So just to wrap up. What did we learn on the show tonight, Roy? Like Jeffrey B. said, it’s all about telling stories. And a press release, a humble little press release is basically you telling a story about your institution and the great people who work there and what they’re doing. You’re telling it to very specific audience, usually reporters, and they still matter. The mainstream media still matter. They’re get their important resources of information and just agenda setting that other sites pick up on.

But, and this is sort of my key point basically, news releases are not just source material for that limited audience anymore. They still are, but that’s not just their only role when they go online. The news releases are the story, or they can be the story, if you choose to think of them that way.

So they’re not just something you slap up and put on letterhead and send out to reporters and forget about. They can really be the mechanism by which you tell your story to the people you care about. You’re not going to use press releases, I don’t think, to communicate 17-year-olds and their parents. But you’re basically using them to get your name out there, to get the recognition of your school out there, in a way that you can control it more online because you’re not just using any it as source material anymore.
Anymore questions?

Audience: What would you have done differently between that poor press release and this one to, I mean you say you don't go do the digging yourself. Have you changed anything in the last few years to make a higher profile?

We do almost always try to make something available on the release that isn’t just the release and, again, not mainly for reporters, but also thinking longer term. We always make hi-res photos available; very simple basic thing.

We used to have a little tag on in our footer. Email the editor for a hi-res photo and no one ever did. But now, we have this huge repository digital photos on almost our faculty, why not make them available? And we updated our news manager tool, that’s our little news CMS, to make it easier for the publicists to do that themselves. They just browse through the photo from our digital archive and upload it automatically to news manager system. And it rescales a little thumbnail version and then links to the big hi-res. So we do that almost all the time.

And we do try to look for – I mentioned the backwards light when we had the luxury of time. It’s often hard to have the luxury of time because the faculty member often doesn’t know what she has that will be of value. You have to ask the right questions. Our guy had no idea we would even care about this whole PDF that he gave us.

But we do try to think about the package more. It’s not a news release. It’s a package. It’s the story. What can we do here? This is big for an illustration. If so, you can talk to the graphic artist. Even though he works in publications, he will help you if he has time. So we do try to do that more often. Any more questions?

It was a conscious choice. The question was we have this new role at news releases online. They’re going to everybody. They’re not just going to reporters. And yet, when you look at them online, they looked like the prints of news release that it gets sent out in letterhead.

It was a conscious decision at one point when we upgraded the template two years ago, when we put out that little bar in to make them look news release, for lack of a better word. We also had a new graphic identity at that time. We had just launched our new logo. University of Rochester went through a very long graphic identity, graphic channel process so kind of using that graphic identity in things like stationary and the kind of unsexy things that really cement the graphic identity was important at that time, so it just happened.

So we wanted to keep that look there. I would love to change it personally. I think, because we also just redid our newsroom – I don’t know if we have time to bring it up – but we also just redesigned our newsroom and it has a much different look now.

This just went live about three weeks ago, a month ago, so I would love to change it. But it was a conscious decision tied to the graphic identity more than anything else. Why it looks the way it looks. I hasten to call what we used to publish just the CMS. It is the CMS. It’s a sort of mini-CMS and it’s homegrown. Our web services guys built it for us a while ago now, 2002.

It’s called news manager colloquially. It’s basically a PHP front end on the My Skill database with a gazillion relational tables underneath that allow you to add clippings. We also just launched the Faculty Experts database that’s managed by the same system. So we have a profile for a faculty expert. We can link to his press releases, we can link to his clips right from his profile because they’re all managed by the same system. But it’s not a content management system and that it’s not a commercial or open source product. It’s something our guys built for us.

Are we out of time? Any more questions? Oh, the question was what’s the relationship between the things you see here on the newsroom and the press releases? There are additional stories here. This is almost all news releases when you are in this section. That says Latest News. This is all press releases. And we used to, like I said, every school in the university has its own PR shop.

They have their own sites that I don’t have anything to do with over at the medical and over at the Simon school and the Eastman school. But we added, again, two years ago this ability to include links to what we call external releases. They’re not really external to the University of Rochester. They’re external to us which kind of gives away a little bit about our thinking that we call them external releases.

So I can have a link to the story about that story senior violinist project. That’s in Eastman School of Music release. And before two years ago, it would not have been on this site. It would’ve been on the Eastman site and nowhere else. We added a way to link to them from here. So this is everybody’s releases plus events from the calendar that Today Section, is an RSS feed coming from our events calendar. And that in the news section, we see the New York Times, Boston Globe; that’s our clippings coming from our news managers system.
I think we’re done. Okay. Thanks everyone.

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Announcer: For more presentations from the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference visit HighEdWeb.org/2008 or sign up for our podcast and feed at HighEdWeb.org/podcast.xml

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