Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Cont'd: More signs Corporate won't walk the walk

Gannett leans more and more on newspapers and TV stations to adopt new technologies, from blogs to video to podcasts, that are key to the company's future. So, how come the company publishes one of its chief communications vehicles like it's still 1999? The Daily News Summary highlights news within the company: Today's edition, for example, carries an item about The Honolulu Advertiser seeking a regional accounts manager. The rest is devoted to industry news, including rumblings that billionaire investor Carl Icahn may seek control of struggling web portal Yahoo.

The summary is published in two now-ancient formats:
  • A daily post on the company's intranet, available to any employee with network access.
  • E-mail automatically sent to those within the company who subscribe; employees can subscribe on the intranet.
A Gannett Blog reader often forwards the summary to me because he knows I don't have access to the intranet. I asked him how the summary could be made more Web 2.0-friendly. "An RSS feed would be nice,'' he said. "Or a stand-alone webpage that also includes podcasts, video and streams. So, when award-winners are announced, the Daily News Summary would include a link to the story, website, podcast or video and employees could view it immediately to get an idea of why it was so powerful."

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1 comment:

  1. The idea is nice. But you'll have to tack the actual work of something like that on the back of some schmoe who just graduated college and took the place of 3 senior people whose positions were consolidated or left intentionally "dark" in order to keep feeding the executive compensation coffers.

    Obviously not a Gannett employee idea. It makes WAAAAAAAAY too much sense.

    ReplyDelete

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