The big three networks are shaking up their fomats for news broadcasts, even changing the concept of what should lead the news. Time for communicators to keep up with those types of changes--and how much better if you can find new tools that update and improve upon tasks of long-standing. This week, you can do more with your media relations calendar and your efforts to migrate media relations to Twitter. Both just got a shot in the arm with these two intriguing services:
- For communications planning, meet the new daybook-on-steroids, called Zapaday, now open in a public beta. (Fair warning: Beta means bugs, potentially, and also forthcoming improvements.) Billed as "the open news calendar," this is a planner's delight. You get a dashboard page focused on tomorrow, with tabs so you can quickly look up events in affairs, culture, sports, business, science and practical (think weather) categories. Below that, you'll see headlines for events in global affairs, countdowns of days left till important news events, special holidays and religious events, new scientific conferences, even trivia. Zapaday founder Stefan Hoevenaar says “Zapaday uses text-mining technology to search the internet for future news events. And we encourage our users to add their own stories and decide for themselves what is important, like on Wikipedia.” The free site also employs fact-checkers, and resides in Amazon's cloud servers, so it's got a good backbone. Anyone who was wishing the old-fashioned daybook of upcoming events could get a facelift will love this service, as Zapaday crawls the web to do a lot of work for you. Customizing it with your own account, views and entries will make it even more useful. It's worth playing with how the front page view changes when you include your location combined with "worldwide" or other news categories. And don't ignore the search function. I can see this being something you and your team check in the morning and last thing in your day to know what's coming next. It's easy to get pigeonholed in your own company or institution's calendar, but Zapaday will help boost your awareness of the news coming from all directions--something that has helped many a communicator avoid getting caught unawares.
- For media relations driven by Twitter: Taking advantage of Twitter's popularity with journalists, MuckRackPro is free for journalists who want to track what their colleagues are doing on Twitter. But PR, communications and social media specialists can get a free 30-day trial, after which the service costs $99 or $199 month for one user, depending on the range of options you want, and $899 a month for a small team of five users. Larger teams and agencies need to get in touch with MuckRack to create accounts for 10 or more users. (Fair warning: They'll ding your credit card and it's up to you to cancel before the free trial is over.) Every level of service has access to the journalist directory, search and unlimited note-taking; you get a sliding scale of media lists or alerts you can create as you step up the price. The service promises more detail on what journalists are covering and doing on Twitter, with more powerful search, and if you've been scouring Twitter by hand for reporters covering your topic, this service will likely save you time. A caution: So many reporters I know prefer NOT to be pitched on Twitter that you still need to respect those limits to be effective. But as a research tool that will let you get to know more about particular reporters' interests, this looks like a good option if the price fits your budget. It's priced less than many other reporter-mining services, but may be more than you are willing to spring, given that it's built on freely available tools.
By the way, you should pass the link at the top of this post around--particularly to your higher-ups. It notes strongly that the evening newscasts, in striving for unique content, are no longer in lockstep on what leads the news each evening, and no longer distiguish between "hard" and "soft" news when it comes to deciding which is more valuable, following longstanding trends on the web. That changes your targets and measurements of success, communications directors. Doesn't it? Best be priming those you want to impress that the measurements, once again, are on the move.
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