Subscription Update for Professional Services
Jinfo Blog

By Robin Neidorf

Abstract

Professional service firms make up a significant portion of FreePint's customer base, and we work closely with our customers in this industry to produce resources that speak to their particular needs for information strategy, procurement, skill development and collaboration with other parts of their businesses. We highlight recent items from FreePint's Content, Community and Consulting.

Item

Content (Articles, Reports and Webinars)

Information managers in professional services have been particularly interested in the FreePint Topic Series: News, and Beyond. The full listing of all content in the series can be found here. These are some of the highlights:

• Survey on News Needs & Preferences: our report based on survey inputs from more than 340 information managers, building on seven years of data on sourcing and distributing news content

• Analysis of the competitive landscape, including a webinar on the subject, a case study of one consultancy that dropped premium news entirely from its portfolio, and comparison of the market-leading suppliers and niche suppliers of news content

• Copyright needs and concerns relating to use and reuse of content and those impacted by current awareness systems and processes

• In-depth reviews of Factiva, BBC Monitoring Library, and NewsEdge.com, as well as Q&As with LexisNexis and Northern Light.

Our contributors also offer thoughtful commentaries, such as: "Has Current Awareness Become a Bloated Term?" which are extremely useful for comparing what's happening in your organisation with others around the world.

This is only a small taste of the full range of content in this Topic Series, most of which is highly relevant to any professional service organisation trying to work out the right budget, strategy, partners and emerging needs relating to news content, whether for current awareness or in-depth research.

Information managers at professional service companies have also been instrumental in helping us plan the next FreePint Topic Series: Making Information Visible. With so many knowledge workers who need constant access to reliable, vetted information, professional services firms have a special focus on how they can make the right resources more visible, accessible and useful to their workers.

If you haven't yet done so, please register your interest in this series to stay informed of when new articles, reports and webinars are added to it.

Community

Information managers at professional services firms were active participants in the Communities of Practice run as part of the News, and Beyond Topic Series - and even hosted in-person sessions.

In-person sessions worked through objectives and value propositions for news resources intended for in-depth research and for current awareness purposes. Teleconference sessions split these into two parts, the first to look at current awareness and the second to look at in-depth research.

You can read more about the discussion from the last of the teleconference CoPs here.

Consulting

With many organisations trying to improve their approach to licensing and distributing news content, it's little surprise that we've had a steady stream of consulting requests from professional services organisations on the subject.

The most efficient approach has been a basic one-hour consultation, to brainstorm and provide some guidance around news content strategy and emerging practices. You can read more about this approach here.

We've also helped design and comment on RFPs for news suppliers; created a strategy around user needs assessments for news content; and provided a bespoke briefing based on our original research on news needs and preferences.

Editor's Note: A FreePint Subscription at the Content level gives access to all FreePint articles, reports and webinars, at the Community level gives access to all FreePint Communities of Practice (as well as all FreePint Content), and at the Consulting level adds a credit for up to six hours of annual consulting time. Find out more.

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