Beyond the New Media Release

What must we do to our media releases to serve the publishing industry.

First of all we need to be able to offer formats that are helpful. Just as a paper press release is unhelpful to a journalist these days, so too is a format that forgets the media need to use SMS.

There is another consideration which is described byAdrian Holovaty who gives a good idea of what 'repurpose' means and says: "I don't mean "Display a newspaper story on a cell phone." I don't mean "Display a newspaper story in RSS." I don't mean "Display a newspaper story on my PDA." Those are fine goals, but they're examples of changing the format, not the information itself. Repurposing and aggregating information is a different story, and it requires the information to be stored atomically -- and in machine-readable format.

This is important for public relations on a number of counts.

Would we have to provide the wider and broader content? Does this mean that the New Media Release is inevitable? Yes it does in order that we can offer the formats that are realistic for todays' media.

But we have to go further.

For example, suggests Adrian "say a newspaper has written a story about a local fire. Being able to read that story on a cell phone is fine and dandy. Hooray, technology! But what I really want to be able to do is explore the raw facts of that story, one by one, with layers of attribution, and an infrastructure for comparing the details of the fire -- date, time, place, victims, fire station number, distance from fire department, names and years experience of firemen on the scene, time it took for firemen to arrive -- with the details of previous fires. And subsequent fires, whenever they happen."

This goes some way beyond a New Media Release because it uses will use the NMR tags to mix and match news stories.

This is how XPRL and NewsML will be helpful to the media and to readers who want to go beyond the news story to offer more facts.

IPTC G2 Family of Standards (which is the new NewsML) will allow news agencies to smoothly exchange news -- text, photos or other media -- while using standard XML modules and tools. The result will be lower costs and shorter development for news agencies and news system vendors who facing the challenges of presenting the news on the web and personal electronic devices.

The PR industry has to work on this to stay with it.