Companies go to great lengths to churn out press releases to generate interest in their products. At the same time reporters routinely ignore press releases; if they want to publish decent articles they have to write them up themselves. As an alternative to the current system, Tom Foremski proposes that companies disaggregate their press releases into useful components:
Deconstruct the press release into special sections and tag the information so that as a publisher, I can pre-assemble some of the news story and make the information useful.He then goes on to suggest how to break apart the press release and — most importantly — that the separate pieces of information be "tagged" so that they will be easy to find and re-assemble.
I think this is a fascinating and useful idea, and is very similar to the current US Securities and Exchange Commission proposals to report financial information in a standard format. Even if editors were to ultimately find this system unusable for their own purposes, it's entirely possible that financial analysts could use press reports in standard format to automatically alert investors to important news stories.
Topics: · concepts · culture · intellectual+property
