Chicago, Ill. – November 5, 2015 — The next generation of news communication launches today with the introduction of NEWSLINE360, a cloud-based newsroom platform offering subscribing newsroom owners a robust toolkit for creating professional, content-rich online newsrooms that link directly to journalists, followers and social media. Each newsroom is accessible from the business’s website.
NEWSLINE360 provides an easy way to manage and automatically disseminate high resolution photos, videos and audio in addition to press material. The online newsrooms also can automatically display and post to the business’s social media channels. NEWSLINE360 is fully mobile device compatible, which means all features and functions are useable on iOS, Android or Chrome OS phones or tablets as well as computers. With packages beginning at $79 per month, NEWSLINE360 is designed to be affordable for nearly any company or organization.
“We developed NEWSLINE360 as a feature-rich and easy-to-use, multi-device platform that represents a new generation of news communication,” said founding partner Michael Iwasaki, a Canadian technology entrepreneur who co-founded 24-7 Press Release, a successful news distribution service, which is now in its tenth year. “Companies, associations, marketing and public relations agencies, governmental agencies, educational institutions and not-for-profit organizations from all sectors, both B2B and B2C, want to get their news and information to their respective media, as well as to their customers, clients, members and other key audiences. NEWSLINE360 is the platform that will make this much easier and extremely cost-effective.”
Features of the NEWSLINE360 online newsrooms include:
Ability to post company information and documents such as press releases, media kits, presentations, marketing material, articles, blog posts, white papers, technical sheets and other pertinent information
Ability to link several high resolution images, video and/or audio to a story
Logo/banner headers and color options are available to personalize the newsroom
Online image and media gallery for managing rich content
Private administrative dashboard to track and manage newsroom activity, including statistics and analytics
Integration with social media: social media feeds can be displayed on newsrooms and news posts can automatically be fed to social media channels
Ability to post events and milestones in a journalist- and customer-accessible calendar
Information is visually impactful and easy to find
“Until NEWSLINE360, there was no affordable way for companies and organizations to have well-designed, multi-purpose online newsrooms that immediately post information to journalists and others who want to receive it,” said Cindy Kurman, another NEWSLINE360 founding partner, who has owned Chicago-based Kurman Communications, Inc., a successful public relations and integrated marketing agency, for 32 years. “We believe that PR agencies and in-house marketing teams will find NEWSLINE360 to be a state-of-the-art platform for managing their clients’ or company’s news output and brand narrative, and getting the information to journalists who want to receive it. NEWSLINE360 is truly a game changer.”
Bringing newsrooms to the forefront as a useful resource
“Our experience and research tell us that most website newsrooms are not well thought out,” Kurman said. “They are buried at the bottom of the company’s website or hidden in a tab. Newsrooms typically are very limited, listing recent press releases but having very little rich media (photos, video) that enhance the story. Because of that, they are of limited benefit to journalists in creating editorial content.”
Just as problematic, journalists who want information about companies typically must navigate to the companies’ websites and hunt around until they find what they’re looking for, if they find it at all. It’s a time consuming and tedious process. NEWSLINE360 changes all that by offering journalists instant and easy access to rich news content that they want to receive and can actually use in their stories. It is delivered to journalists directly-and automatically-into their proprietary NEWSLINE360 Media Desk dashboard. “NEWSLINE360 is the perfect matchmaker between businesses and journalists,” said Kurman.
“More and more companies are looking for new avenues with multi-channels to deliver their messages and NEWSLINE360 delivers this in a way that wasn’t available before,” founding partner Winson Tang said. “It provides a platform to increase readership and loyalty, push information to multiple media easily, build a customizable subscriber list of customers and media, and provide analytics.”
NEWSLINE360 also was developed with the needs of journalists in mind.
As rich as the features are for newsroom owners, NEWSLINE360 also has been designed to meet the needs of media professionals. Among the benefits to journalists:
There is no cost or charge of any kind to be a media subscriber on the NEWSLINE360 network.
With a private dashboard, inbox and briefcase, journalists get the kind of control, organization and privacy for which they have been asking.
Journalists receive only the news they want to receive by following newsrooms and/or industries of their choice or searching for news by keywords, geographic area and other variables.
Journalists can choose to receive any type of news post that assists them: press releases, articles, blog posts, photos, videos and/or documents.
Newsroom owners provide media contacts that are easily accessible for journalists. They can provide both general media contacts and specific media contacts for a particular story or information post. The connection with the contact is direct and confidential.
NEWSLINE360 does not give out the names of journalists to newsroom owners, so they won’t be bombarded with follow-up pitches, phone calls and emails. Journalists can identify themselves to news sources if and when they want to.
Using NEWSLINE360’s JAQ service (Journalists Asking Questions), journalists can send media requests to newsroom owners, anonymously if they wish, in order to identity new sources and get story information.
To the NEWSLINE360 team, the old way of having a newsroom, one that’s hard to find and with limited information, doesn’t make sense any more. “All organizations have a brand narrative to communicate to the marketplace,” said founding partner Lee Barrie, who was one of the pioneers in bringing integrated desktop computer-based editorial systems to the magazine industry in the 1990s (Hearst, Times Mirror and New York Times). “If they don’t have a way to rise above the clutter, they will simply be overlooked. The most important purpose of NEWSLINE360 is to get your organization and brand in front of media-not any media, but the right media, those who are actually interested in the information and are more likely to include the information in their stories.”
“Journalists increasingly complain that they are bombarded with email and telephone story pitches that are irrelevant to their assignments,” said Kurman. “That’s because press releases are typically distributed using a ‘shotgun’ approach and news sources follow up to pitch their stories. In contrast, NEWSLINE360 lets journalists choose to receive only the news they want, confidentially, that is useful to them from companies that fit their demographics. These are the quality, targeted news sources that journalists are looking for.”
Source: Newsline360
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