Microsoft’s News Center is 2017 PR Daily Awards winner for websites

The Microsoft News Center is just one part of the larger Microsoft.com family of sites. The site, with its tile-based homepage and collection of high-quality brand journalism focusing on people (including customers and employees), has won first place in the “Website” category of Ragan’s 2017 PR Daily Awards.

The team that makes the site happen includes a corps of seasoned journalists who come together to tell stories of people whose lives are improved by the technology Microsoft develops and sells. While the site’s focus is clearly on these stories, which rival the best storytelling in any professional news outlet, the site also includes all the components any journalist would look for when visiting an online newsroom, from executive and board bios to video b-roll, press releases, executive speeches, an image gallery and analyst reports. 

The team also publishes a set of blogs, including the Official Microsoft Blog, Transform, the AI Blog and Microsoft on the Issues. It also handles event press sites that collect blog posts, press releases and other assets to help journalists get the news they need and the assets to cover the story. 

All of the News Center content is tweeted out through the @MSFTnews account, which is followed by nearly 1 million people. Mainstream journalists have picked up stories from the News Center and used its assets to tell their own stories. Traffic is enviable—7.9 million unique visitors viewing 14.7 million pages during 9.8 million visits. 

Congratulations to Microsoft for its win.