Media Spotlight: Bdaily

Bdaily is an online business news provider edited by Tom Keighley. Originally a North East news service, Bdaily recently relaunched its website and now covers the whole of England.

Tom has been at Bdaily for a year and in that time the company’s proposition has changed. On the new website, membership sign up and contribution is easier, with the aim of making the user part of the news stream. Bdaily’s users are mostly SME professionals, owner-operators and entrepreneurs. There is also interest in the site from public sector workers and comms teams in larger corporate companies trying to keep abreast of the SME landscape.

The editorial staff focus on general news and interviews. Tom describes his team as ‘generalists’, knowing a ‘little bit about a lot of things’. This allows them to report relevant factual stories and leave long-form, in-depth analysis up to the contributor community. The community is made up of 400 experts from a variety of sectors that are trusted by Bdaily to self-publish useful content.

New contributors come from people Tom’s team meets, members commenting on Bdaily or people interacting on other related websites. One of the community benefits is the ability to build an online following; the most successful, according to Tom, are those who stick their neck out and say something controversial.

PR professionals are able to join the community and promote their clients under a ‘Membership News’ label, which differentiates it from editorial news. Tom feels this set up is conducive to what PRs are trying to achieve and their client news can still be valuable to his business audience. He cites recruitment, investment wins and new premises stories as examples of interesting news that is useful to the site.

The new website has greater social media functionality and is considered by Tom as complementary to other platforms; you can sign in to Bdaily through Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Site members can follow other members and receive updates when they contribute. The daily bulletin is preference-led (with filters for region and sector) and consists of top editorial news and relevant membership stories. With the vast quantity of content available on Bdaily, different people get different variations of the bulletin.

Editorial information on Bdaily, Tom Keighley and thousands of other media contacts, can be found in the Vuelio media database.