I’ve been writing a lot about how every company is a media company and Intel is one of those companies that understands this idea very well.
Intel has put together an editorial team that seeks to use the best journalistic practices to publish high quality news, features and video. It is separate from its newsroom but staffed by some of Intel’s corporate communications team.

This morning I spoke with Bill Calder and Ken Kaplan about the project (http://freepress.intel.com). Here are some notes from our conversation:

– With all the changes happening in media, journalists are having to cover a lot of beats and they don’t have the time to do in-depth reporting on Intel, or much in-depth reporting at all. It is frustrating because there are some great stories within Intel that aren’t being told.

– We know we have the expertise in-house to report on these stories so we thought why not do it ourselves? We have people on Intel’s communications team that are former journalists so we put together a team, that includes us and one or two others, to try and tell these stories.

– Our communications team, for good or bad, is very focused on product launches. But there are so many other stories to tell. Intel is a very large company with many interesting projects, and people.

-It is very much a dream position for us, we’ve been talking within Intel about doing something like this and its great to be able to have the resources to launch this venture.

– Anyone is free to use the stories from Intel Free Press. Our goal is to have some of the largest news sites running these stories, in whole, or in part.

– Our biggest challenge is credibility. People tend to distrust corporate blogs, so we have to show that our stories are fair, and high quality, so that people trust us.

– Our goal isn’t to compete with other news sites, we aren’t going to do a deep dive into the technology or benchmarking our chips. It’s about telling stories that haven’t been told yet. For example, a story on our VP of Investor Relations (Caught in the Crossfire: Intel’s Investor Relations Chief – SVW)

– We will also write about our partners, showing some of the interesting things they are doing. There will be a wide variety of stories every week.

– We also have a team of about 15 people that produce "Circuits." This is written for Intel employees and only available internally. There is a lot of great content there that we will publish on Free Press.

– Intel Free Press will be our main job. We may expand the team by bringing in outside contributors, other journalists. We want to create a media brand that is clearly distinguished from the rest.

– We decided not to use bylines so that we can use one voice and give it more of a news agency feel. And that should make it easier for other publishers if they want to reuse all, or part of our stories. They don’t even have to attribute it to Intel.

– Success will be measured by the take up in search results and also the stories being re-used by major media outlets. And that should also lead to bloggers linking to the stories.

– Our legal department has been pretty good about it.

– We’ve set up Free Press as being separate from the Intel newsroom although there is a link from the newsroom.
– You can follow Intel Free Press on Twitter: @IntelFreePress.

{Cross-posted at Silicon Valley Watcher]