Should You Be Doing A Daily News Briefing?

PRNewsOnline recently posted an article about daily news briefings, stating:

“If your organization’s news alerts are boring on a slow day, or if you remember they exist only during product launches and crises, you risk ignoring a vital resource. Corporate communicators who look beyond the basic utility and format of daily media reports can develop an intelligent view of opportunities and challenges while applying a useful tool for internal messaging…”

I completely agree with their thoughts on how to create a company news briefing and why they’re important for any organization. However, I completely disagree that the emails should be daily.

Instead of daily, it makes much more sense to be updating an internal collaborative space as news and information of interest and importance become available. From there, you can then distribute a weekly news round-up of sorts that highlights the key news and developments of the week. This plan of action makes much more sense for a couple reasons:

  1. By cultivating and posting content on an enterprise social network or another type of collaborative workspace, all employees have one place to go to catch up on all the relevant news and information. It’s available to them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and is referenceable for them if and when they need to go back in time for information they need.
  2. Daily emails are overwhelming in email boxes that are already busting at the seams. With the amount of email I receive every day, the daily news alerts generated by a company get filtered out of my inbox and go directly to trash. I never look at them. I’m not missing anything. And I’m willing to bet this is the same for you and your employees.

Another benefit of cutting out the daily email news briefing? When there is urgent, breaking news or information that must be shared immediately with the organization, the email that must be sent for that has a higher chance of being opened and read because your employees know that it must be important. How do they know that? Because you’re choosing to not bombard them every day with email but, instead, are using email very selectively and for matters that are truly urgent/important.

That’s my two cents on the daily news briefing… what do you think?