The letter to the editor rises from the grave
Posted Thursday, August 9th, 2007 at 9:42 am by Eric (25 posts)
One the challenges nonprofit PR staff have faced in recent years is the challenge of responding to news online. If an inaccurate story appears on Google or Yahoo! news, there’s no editor to call to set the record straight. If a thousand bloggers swarm around bad news for your organization, what do you do? Manually posting your own reply in the comments section of thousands of blogs is overwhelmingly labor intensive.
Google News now allows organizations and individuals that are quoted in the stories it indexes to post comments in reply. This has the potential to be a much more efficient way to respond to online news than most others we have experimented with.
And although it’s been a long time since I took a reporter to lunch, I remember they used to tell me they often used Google News to research what other journalists had written about a topic before starting their own stories. This suggests that’s it worth your time to respond to stories when you can.
Here’s an example: a story about a study that suggests that McDonalds’ advertising and branding practices have unfortunate consequences for children. Two organizations profiled in the story have elaborated on the points raised in the piece.
Very interesting. Hat tip to Lost Remote for this one.
