How to structure your media archives

By Helena Wennergren

Press, media, news... there are many names for the section that holds the most recent information about a company on their website. We often get questions on how to organise this section and how it should relate to the IR section.

Regulatory releases are required by the stock markets, and the companies want to tell the world about their products or services. The target groups for this information can be anyone from journalists and investors to private shareholders and the general public. Our latest annual research for Webranking by Comprend continues to show that the press release archive is of high importance and only marginally more important to journalists than to analysts and investors.

This is probably no surprise to anyone, but the big question for many companies is how to organise press releases, regulatory releases and news articles in the best way to make it easy for visitors to find what is relevant to them and to not overcomplicate the internal processes.

It is not only about presenting the latest releases, but making it easier to find releases based on their content and release date (both year and month). This is even more important to analysts and investors than to journalists, most likely as they are interested in certain topics or events.

We have summarised the question into two major challenges.

Challenge 1 - how to combine all types of releases and news

As we mentioned earlier, there are often different types of releases and news on a corporate website. Each of them can - and should - usually be sorted into different categories to make it easy to filter out the right information. Remember that it is not only the latest release that the user might be looking for. Regulatory or price-sensitive releases could for example be categorised into share transactions and financial reports. Press releases could use categories such as Products, R&D, sustainability and so on.

There are different ways to solve this. Here are a few alternatives:

Unicredit present two lists - one for press releases and one for news. Both lists offer the possibility to filter by category. The press release archive also provides a simple check box for "price-sensitive releases" as well as clear labels for the category for each release.

See Unicredit's press release archive 

Stora Enso have different archives for the different types of news. However, they list the latest news in these categories on the press landing page. This makes it easy to understand that there are different archives. Even though the user needs to understand which archive to go to, it is a good way to tell the user that there is more than one archive.

See Stora Enso's newsroom

British Land present a more visual press release archive, also with the possibility to filter on categories such as Retail, Offices, Corporate and Sustainability, or year/month.

See British Land's press release archive

Challenge 2 - both Media and IR want to show releases in their sections

Visitors often find different types of press and regulatory releases in different parts of the website, such as Media and Investors. This is often related to interpretations of legal requirements in different countries or expectations from stock exchanges. Sometimes it might have to do with different departments being in charge of the archives, although the internal ownership should not be reflected on the website.

If you provide these archives in different places on the website, consider if it would be possible to place them in the same section to make it easier for the visitors. If not, you need to take other action so that the visitors understand that they might need to go to more than one place. To avoid duplicating the information, simply add a link between the archives.

Finally, it goes without saying that the press releases and news should be available directly in HTML so that they are easy to read from any device.

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