Many of you are already familiar with the Wire at svconline.com. In honor of its 10th anniversary, I wanted to draw special attention to it. I also wanted to thank some of the original members who helped us get this news resource off the ground and whose contribution to its development was critical and generous.
Some of the intrepid early adopters included Clyne Media, Brainstorm Media, Wall Street Communications, Raz PR, Pipeline Communications, DPagan, CRL Public Relations, David Steinberg, Traci Schaefer, Elaine Jones, Katinka Allender, Christopher Shuler, Heather Davis, Howard Sherman, Jim Noyd, Lisa Young at Yamaha, Grace Paoli at Community Professional, and my lone integrator representative, Theresa Hahn. I remain so grateful to all these beta users, and to the hundreds of members who have joined since and who contribute so much to the Wire’s success.
My team and I founded the Wire in 2006 under its original name, the Briefing Room. Our concept was a virtual press conference, where member publicists could post news releases and get them in front of our readers immediately, just as so often happens live at tradeshows. We figured that readers could go to one location to see the industry releases aggregated in one easy place. I remember thinking at the time, “Wouldn’t it be great if readers could see my inbox?” It was literally packed with news that often didn’t make it onto our site.
We did receive some criticism that we were providing a forum for unedited PR. But even 10 years ago it was clear that press releases would be in the wild one way or another, and that people were perfectly capable of evaluating the merit of the content for themselves. I strongly felt there were more important things for editors to do than take adjectives out of press releases.
Ten years ago, before blogs and expressions like “usergenerated content” were common, it seemed a little radical to give people the ability to post to our site. But I knew that all the Wire members would be bound by the same professional standards that affected all their other work. I wasn’t worried.
And I trusted the readers to discern what they were reading. Over the past decade, the Wire has grown, won a national award, and continues to thrive, thanks to the efforts of the members and the reception of the readers. As an editor, I’m happy to have that front line of information out there. I like being able to curate and choose which postings to amplify or redistribute, and I like to spend my time going deeper on fewer things. And the readers can self-curate as well. Maybe they like something I didn’t pick out of the flow.
The Wire is also open to integrators and consultants and we accept case studies and other types of content as well as press releases. If you want to get credentials just let me know at [email protected] and I’ll set you up.
