In a nutshell, NewsBasis is a site where journalists and bloggers can find sources, while experts and companies can find journalists and bloggers to write about them in their articles.
WebProNews had a conversation with NewsBasis Founder and CEO Darryl Siry (who also happens to be a contributor to Wired, and was formerly CMO of Tesla Motors) about how the site has performed since launching at the beginning of the month.
"Initial participation was well beyond what I had been planning for, which is a good thing, but keep in mind I am not fully satisfied until we are used by all folks in the media industry on both sides of the table," Siry tells us.
We asked about participation from both journalists and experts. "The participation on the company rep side is a good mix of companies, PR agencies, independent professionals, academic institutions and non-profits," he says. "On the journalist side you also see a broad range of participation, from bloggers to regional newspapers to major news organizations."
Perusing article topic requests on NewsBasis, one can find various familiar names and publications. That’s got to be encouraging for the company.
"Of course, there are more experts/companies using the service than journalists, but that’s what I would expect as that reflects the industry," he continues. "There are many more people seeking attention of reporters than there are reporters, and it is important to have deep inventory of experts and sources."
I don’t think he’ll get many arguments from reporters there.
Siry certainly knows how the game is played, as he has written not only for Wired, but for other publications like VentureBeat and Business Insider. Combine that with marketing gigs he has held in the past. He’s clearly played on both sides of the ball.
As user experience plays greatly into the success of any product, we also asked for plans about upcoming features.
"We are balancing customer acquisition activities with our pace of product development," Siry tells us. "There are lots of great features and tweaks that we have been working through and as the product gets better I expect that we will see more users come on to the system. We have features already built in to the system that we haven’t really promoted because you can only say so much in a marketing message, so part of my challenge is to educate existing customers about how full featured we are."
"For example, we have built in real time news alerts that work quite well and we also have a robust annotation and sharing system that can be used by journalists for online research," he explains.
Of course, users can always keep abreast of the latest NewsBasis happenings on the company blog, which has provided numerous updates since the early August launch of NewsBasis.
Journalists, bloggers, and brands all potentially have a lot to gain from a system like NewsBasis. At this point, it’s just a matter of attracting the users, and getting them to stick with it. This appears to be the main area of focus for the company at the moment. In fact, Siry emailed me personally to let me know that I hadn’t activated my account after initially signing up, weeks ago. It worked. I logged in that day.