Despite all you’ve heard about the shrinking of newsrooms around the country, this traditional form of journalism is enjoying a renaissance of sorts — in the corporate world.

Some are calling it brand journalism. Companies are employing and training journalists to develop stories and video about their brands, their products and their research. And they are delivering the content through Websites that look more like wsj.com or cnn.com than a corporate brochure. A great example is IBM with an entire site that focuses on how to make technology work smarter and better. Boeing packages videos in a format that resembles  TV news stories.

Proponents of the idea say by shifting the emphasis to product and brand promotion to delivering useful content, they are increasing brand awareness in a credible way.

Whether you embrace this approach or not, the key point to be made is your communications need to fullfill an audience need — a quest for information, dialogue, or simply to be entertained.