As part of the preparation for my next project, I’ve spent half a day looking at what’s going on in the New Media industry as a whole, so I can get a better grasp on the trends in the industry, everything from companies that are hiring (and likewise how they promote this) through to corporate announcements, site changes, and even design changes.
But there’s one thing that struck me: new media seems to be particularly bad at promoting itself.
Content is king, but likewise sites/ networks of a particular size should also be talking themselves up outside of the content itself. Some sites do; some of the bigger players have media pages where you can subscribe to media releases or a corporate blog. The content is varied, but it’s there.
But what struck me is how many don’t.
I’m not talking about small sites, I’m talking about big networks and big sites.
The likes of Gigaom, VentureBeat, Gawker and TechCrunch for example don’t offer site news pages. Mashable does…but there’s no way to subscribe to it. b5media (or B5Media as they’ve re-branded themselves) offer news page but with no way of subscribing to it, and I’m not talking about email (although that wouldn’t be a bad option vs none at all) but RSS as well.
That’s but a small cross section of names I’ve stumbled across today.
I can’t break glass houses without saying that I haven’t done it in the past either, but The Inquisitr at 8m page views a month was hardly a Mashable at 40 million page views. Perhaps I’m too old school in terms of PR: I’d expect large businesses to self promote and announce, where as the fact is that I’ve found it hard to even subscribe to feeds from NASDAQ listed companies.
There’s another post to be written on defining exactly what is a new media company, but I think I’ve just identified one difference where new media needs to catch up to old media in.
