It annoys me when companies and organisations provide media releases on their websites as PDF files.
The files are often too large and slow to open; many have copying disabled; it opens a new browser window and sometimes crashes Firefox.
As someone experienced with both media releases and website content management, I can’t understand why anyone would do this. PDF content generally isn’t as effective with search engines and it’s simply not user friendly for basic online documents.
Media releases are meant for public consumption. It should be easy to copy them and cut extracts.
PDF files are okay for large documents, like annual reports or newsletters, but they shouldn’t be used for single pages.
An organisation using PDF for online news makes it impossible to edit or alter the original media release, but that achieves nothing useful.
If media releases were published online as Word documents, they could be altered and retransmitted, so I understand why they should not be used.
What companies and organisations should do is enter the content of their news articles into the website CMS as posts or pages.
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