It’s no secret that PRWeek is undergoing a redesign, an annoying little countdown teaser has been flashing on the home page for a while now, but from an outsider’s perspective, it seems that bigger changes are already a foot; changes in how the publication approaches its content.
You can see this in a recent bevy of news articles and features that just seem to be more in tune with industry trends. Andrew Gordon’s piece this week on Mozilla and open-source marketing is just one example.
Another good one is Keith O’Brien’s new bi-weekly column “What Goes Online,” which looks at how technology and the web are impacting companies. In fact, the second part of his two-part series on engaging the blogosphere (see the first on pitching blogs) just published today and in it he takes a cold hard look at the challenges and limitations that come with corporations trying to navigate the conversational web:
“But people are always going to bitch about your products. Blogs make that process easier and louder today. The bigger conversation needs to go on inside your company, to help executives understand there will inevitably be a lot of posts about various incidents. We should post our response on our blog, put a press release, or contact the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ will eventually write about the situation if it gets enough steam.”
The tone and writing style also feels a little more real, a little more raw (dare I say blog-ish), and it’s cool to see PRW finally linking to outside sources and syndicating its content. It seems only a small step from here to start opening up channels for real-time reader comments and community forming, and who knows, maybe we’ll see that with the redesign, but one thing I’m certain we *won’t see* is a lift on the content firewall for non-subscribers — but I’m not gonn’a bitch about that anymore, because as long as the content is compelling, I don’t mind paying for it.
Mike Manuel is the founder of the award winning Media Guerrilla blog. Media Guerrilla is an insiders take on the practice of technology public relations with a focus on the issues, tactics and trends that are specific to the tech industry.
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