Digital Publishing Platform PressPage to Help PR People

Ragan Communications, publisher of PR Daily and Ragan.com, has joined with the Dutch tech firm PressPage to offer a platform that frees Web publishing from the stranglehold of IT and places it in the hands of public relations (PR) and corporate communications people.

Ragan CEO Mark Ragan and PressPage co-founder and CEO Bart Verhulst have been exploring a partnership since they met at a conference in Amsterdam in 2012. PressPage says it makes brand journalism easy.

The platform enables communicators and marketers to create rich media sites and easily update them with stories, photos, and video. It turns “press release graveyards”—forgotten caches of old announcements—into powerful tools for search engine optimization, says the company.

“Communicators need something that allows them to be up and running as publishers in a matter of weeks,” Ragan said. “PressPage has created the platform for them. Everything is there, and it’s easy to use. And it conforms with everything I teach in my workshops.”

The partnership makes sense for Verhulst as well. He calls Ragan “one of the forefathers in brand journalism,” helping PressPage to reach a target audience of communicators.

“Mark Ragan’s vision of brand journalism is perfectly aligned with the mission of PressPage,” Verhulst says.

“PR pros and other communicators say they love the idea of taking a big-media approach to publishing: ditching the corporate-speak, telling stories, producing video and photos,” Ragan adds. “But they complain that they must bug overworked IT people every time they want to tweak an article or add an infographic online.”

PressPage makes it easy to push out content to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media. Tick the relevant boxes, and it automatically posts to those channels. Users can edit the text to adapt their voice for each platform.

PressPage is a content-sharing-platform technology provider for social newsrooms, virtual press centers, and online media hubs.