Press releases – the fight back

By Caroline Gilmour, copywriter

The poor old press release. When it’s not being called irrelevant, a dinosaur and no better than horrible spam it’s being accused of being shoddy, badly written and even laughable. It’s enough to make anyone cry. 

We think press releases can be good – really – and it’s time to make a stand to praise it in all its beautiful, contradictory, frustrating glory. Here are the reasons why:

1. There are good reasons for press releases to be the way they are

Press releases are designed to deliver information in a quick, easy and useful way. There are strict rules to writing press releases, rules designed to give journalists the hook, the story and back-up info as logically and handily as possible. This is a good structure and shouldn’t be casually dismissed, even in these digital times. The web hasn’t made news stories irrelevant for example, it’s just made them leaner and meaner. It’s the same with press releases.

2. Press releases are a journalist’s friend

It probably seems to many journalists that press releases are not their friend. Releases can come across as boring and self-serving, and indeed very many of them are. PR people are balancing promotion with the delivery of information and mostly the promotion side wins. But this is not the fault of the press release, it’s the fault of the author.

When done well, a press release should give a journalist everything they need to start a story. It shouldn’t BE the whole story, but it should give a direction in terms of angle, tone and where to go for further information.  It should be obvious what the story is and why it’s relevant. Agreed, agencies need to work hard on matching press releases more closely to the needs of the journalist but don’t throw out the baby with the bath water.

3. Don’t blame the press release for the failings of mere human beings

Press releases are often badly written. This is a failing of the PR agency. There are several things that can go wrong with a release, from not spotting the real story (sometimes there isn’t one), to stiff, jargony language, simple typos and tortuous sentence structure. It’s the agency’s job to train these faults out of their staff.

4. Let’s work together to turn the press release into art

I cannot tell you the number of times a colleague or a client has said: “Let’s make this different from a normal release,” and in the end we have written a standard release after all. This is because press releases are logical and they work. The basic mechanics of the release don’t need to change, we just need to get better at applying them. For example:

- Don’t confuse a pitch with a press release. The press release is the back-up repository of information, the pitch is the upfront ‘selling in’ stuff. All the contact building/relationship building should be done by the PR professional, not by the press release. If the story is self evident and the journalist can go it alone in terms of research, you might not even need a release.  

- However, there are some cases where volume of work makes it difficult to pitch to every journalist individually which is when we need to make the release interesting. Get to the story straight away and use language that is easy to understand. Journalists have no time and patience for PR nonsense. This is a skill and it has to be encouraged and developed.

- Choose quality over quantity. Good PRs know that the one important contact that is very likely to be interested is more important than a few tenuous contacts who may or may not pick up the story. Focus and target the release.

- Get the story into the headline/subject line. Usually this is the only bit that journalists read. We need to make it mind-crushingly obvious what the story is.

Here’s to making press releases better.