A company’s online newsroom is a fundamental tool for communicating with its stakeholders. Mynewsdesk, a brand newsroom and multimedia PR platform, stresses that brands aren’t making the most of their newsrooms.

The 2014 Newsroom Report rates the online newsrooms of the top 10 UK organisations in five key sectors; local government, universities, grocery, high street, and travel. 2014 has seen a steep increase in the amount of people browsing on their smartphones and Mynewsdesk wanted to see if this would come across in the study.

The organisations were marked against a range of criteria that included content, multimedia, social media, and mobile. The best practice criteria was devised by Mynewsdesk and professionals from across the communications industry.

The report found that the majority of organisations have not invested enough into their online newsrooms, and are therefore losing out on an opportunity to communicate directly with their stakeholders.

Only one in five of the organisations in the Mynewsdesk study offered responsive or mobile newsrooms, and the travel sector performed particularly badly in this category. 84% of organisations had some form of a newsroom on their website, and the overall average score in the 2014 study was 26.3%, a drop from last year’s average of 38%.

Mynewsdesk stress that a newsroom is no longer just a means of communicating with the media, but a way to communicate with bloggers, investors, and even customers.

For the full report, see here.