Searching for the perfect newsroom

Is 'newsroom expert' a job title? In the last 8 years, I have been involved in planning, designing, building, migrating and hosting a lot of newsrooms. From small startups and NGO's all the way up to large brands like Sennheiser, AXA or Shopify.

Within Prezly we offer three newsroom themes that I'm not super proud of. The first one has been there for almost 8 years with minimal maintenance and upgrades. In fact, some of our clients have customised newsrooms that are notably better than we offer our customer base.

In the next 3 months, we're going to fix that.

Examples / Inspiration

To prepare for this project I wanted to get some inspiration from the best newsrooms out there. Googling my favourite brands with search queries like 'Apple newsroom' or 'Red Bull newsroom' turned out to be really underwhelming.

What are we looking for?

What is a newsroom? A website with a list of news items/stories listed in chronological order? So like a blog? Or a magazine?

Please help by suggesting the newsrooms you really like.

Use Cases

Looking at the use cases of Prezly I've split the research into three different use-cases:

1. Brand newsroom: Site with a listing of important company news and stories
2. Blog: A lot like a newsroom (1) but more focus on text and author.
3. Other: Anything else that is about some kind of chronological listing of content. For example a website to announce podcast episodes, or a cooking blog.

Brand Newsroom

To research brand newsrooms I used the top 50 most valuable global brands together with the 500 favorite Millennial brands to search for relevant results. All the newsrooms that are noteworthy were added to an airtable sheet with a rough rating to do more research later.

It might surprise you but the results browsing through all those newsrooms were really underwhelming. To prove it lets take the 10 most valuable global brands with their main newsrooms:

• Apple - www.apple.com/newsroom
• Amazon - press.aboutamazon.com
• Microsoft - news.microsoft.com
• Google - www.blog.google
• Samsung - news.samsung.com/global
• Coca-Cola - www.coca-colacompany.com/news
• Toyota - global.toyota/en/newsroom
• Mercedes - www.mercedes-benz.com/en/newsroom
• McDonald's - corporate.mcdonalds.com/corpmcd/our-stories.html
• Disney - thewaltdisneycompany.com/news

Only a few of those check all the boxes when it comes to design, content organisation and performance. But we haven't even talked about performance, accessibility or privacy controls.

I am looking for more examples of good looking Brand newsrooms. Please help by suggesting your own in this form.
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All research (Lighthouse scores, Design rating, Accessibility score) will be shared in this open spreadsheet.