When the ResponseSource Enquiry Service was conceived the idea was that staff and freelance journalists would be the only people placing media requests.

Things have of course changed and journalists no longer have exclusivity over content creation like before - today citizen journalists mingle with corporate authors as well as journalists to generate the content we access online.

And so for a while we've been opening up ResponseSource to non-journalists. Perhaps the most interesting group here being bloggers. We also allow subscribing PR professionals to post enquiries.

The response from the PR community has been mostly positive with many loving the fact that bloggers are sending media requests. However some perceive that these enquiries and those from PR subscribers 'dilute' the service (please note our preferences system allows users to filter out these enquiries).

Personally, I believe opening up ResponseSource is the right way forward. While they may vary in quality and influence blogs are undoubtedly important for any brand and enquires from bloggers represent opportunities for the PR community. And now that part of the PR role is content creation, allowing PR subscribers to post enquiries reflects the changing role of PR.

Out of curiosity we took a look at the ratio of enquiries from journalists, bloggers and other senders and here are the results.

Interestingly, staff and freelance journalists still represent the vast majority of media requests - 86 per cent in fact. Bloggers represent four per cent and PR subscribers represent five per cent.

Personally, I'd prefer to see more bloggers making enquiries, wouldn't you?

We analysed nearly 20,000 ResponseSource requests sent between 1 January 2012 and 16 October 2012. Here are the results in text format:

Sender Type	Share
Staff journalist	44%
Freelance journalist	42%
TV/radio researcher/producer	2%
Editorial promotions	3%
Independent blogger	4%
PR subscriber to ResponseSource	5%

We've been hard at work over the last few months developing the latest addition to the DWPub Media Suite - SourceWire News Distribution Newsrooms.

Our newsroom service offers brands and PR agencies an easy to manage online newsroom that combines press releases, pictures and other collateral with social media feeds. We could see that PR and marketing professionals wanted newsrooms that were simple to create and maintain but could also be customised to properly reflect their own branding, so that's what we built.

I think every brand should have a good online newsroom which combines traditional press material with social media feeds such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Online newsrooms, or social media newsrooms, support modern PR practice which reaches beyond journalists to bloggers, other influencers and stakeholders and indeed consumers also.

By having media material all in one place in a simple to navigate online newsroom ensures that journalists and other people interested in your brand can find content easily and make contact, either by traditional or social channels.

Our newsroom service integrates closely with SourceWire News Distribution so you get the benefit of distribution to our extensive media community every time you upload a press release. Everyone who distributes a press release through SourceWire News Distribution gets a free Standard Newsroom. You can upgrade to a Custom Newsroom, with enhanced customisation and social integration, or go a step further to a Hosted Newsroom that appears on your own internet domain.

It is of course possible to build an online newsroom from scratch or to base it on a blogging platform such as Wordpress. However, both of these options require sigficant development and maintenance effort. A SourceWire News Distribution Newsroom cuts out this overhead and enables PR professionals to concentrate on publishing material through their newsroom without the need for development skills or an IT department.

We're not first to market with newsrooms - you can get them elsewhere - but our objective is to provide all the best elements of a social media newsroom backed up by a British company with 15 years experience of working closely with the media community.

See the press release (in our newsroom, of course!)

Attending Cybher, a recent event for women bloggers, was a revelation in many ways – not least how the event felt more like a ‘movement’ than a conference, a wonderful antidote to the hundreds of dry corporate events I’ve been to over the years.

I spoke on the ethics panel at the end of the day. Normally at this end of a conference many of the seats earlier filled with delegates would be empty, such is the temptation for many to bunk off early . But at Cybher the room was still very full, a demonstration of the passion many bloggers have for their craft.

During the session I made the point that journalists are often trained – either in college or on the job – on many aspects which relate to ethics. I went on to assert that it would be very useful for bloggers to have access to this kind of knowledge.

Someone in the audience challenged me, saying “that’s a bit rich,” referring obviously to recent examples of ethical abuses among the journalist community, most notably the hacking scandal.

It was a good challenge and prompted me to argue that while some journalists behave unethically, the majority do not and one must remember that it was journalists who unearthed the hacking scandal in the first place, just like it was journalists that unearthed the MPs expenses scandal. (See this related post by Ellen Arnison.)

In any case, I added, I was not suggesting that bloggers should behave just like journalists (it’s a separate point but also journalism can be quite formulaic which could stifle the creative freedom of blogging) however knowledge of some skills and knowledge associated with journalism could be very useful to bloggers and give them confidence to do an even better job of serving their audiences.

This is a subject I may return to in a little more detail.