Every PR professional and entrepreneur has spent hours, days or a week crafting the “perfect” press release. Your CEO is interviewed, your facts are checked, and your prose gets styled with precision and panache. It goes through a committee, a proofreader, friends and family, until it shines like a diamond illuminated by white lights of fascinating, beautiful data crystals.
Then you release it and wait for the inevitable flood of phone calls, emails and congratulations that never come. Even if you use a service like PR Newswire of Business Wire, many releases end up on page 67 of an independent TV station website in Reno, Nevada that few will ever read.
What’s wrong? In an earlier column,
“How To Turbocharge Your Writing For Public Relations,”
we covered the fundamentals on press release craftsmanship: Write a great headline, avoid useless acronyms, keep the bragging to a minimum and most importantly, start with the most important story angle. But that’s only the beginning. Your job is to turn your information or story angle into an actual story. To discover what really interests the media and what ticks them off, we asked reporters and editors for their thoughts on press releases. The unofficial results: journalists loved them and asked for more. They want you to increase your output, emailing and texting them constantly.
Now, let’s return to Planet Earth. Here are the unfiltered, honest, sometimes brutal yet always helpful, responses from some of the top journalists at publications including The Atlantic, Los Angeles Times, Mashable, Popular Science, Tech Crunch and Yahoo!.
Jennifer Bogo
, Executive Editor, Popular Science
What annoys you about press releases?
What could PR people do to make them better?
Have you ever found a good story via a press release?
I have. But more often, I find information that supports a story I’m already thinking about and I fold that lead into my other research.
Samantha Murphy Kelly
, Tech Reporter, Mashable
“Press releases are an efficient way to get news out to reporters, but often the language used is very dense and tedious to get through. I sometimes read an entire press release and can’t pull out the key takeaway. Subjects can be complicated to begin with, especially when it comes to science and technology, so language that really cuts to the chase and explains the news is most helpful. I always like to say, explain it to me in a sentence or two like you were telling your Grandmother, before getting into the specifics. It’s always good to know “why” the news is important too — if it’s not my main area of coverage, I could overlook groundbreaking news and just not know it. At the same time, it’s good not to oversell it with words like “groundbreaking” when it’s really not. It’s definitely possible to find good stories in press releases, but because many people get the same announcement, there are limitations and writers don’t want to publish the same story as another outlet. By granting embargoes and doing pre-press release briefings, this will ensure the writer has enough time to put together an insightful piece and get the background information and quotes they need. That additional time is so appreciated.
Rick Newman
, Columnist, Yahoo! Finance
What annoys you about press releases?
What could PR people do to make them better?
Get to the point right away and let me know what it is in the subject line. Look up my last 20 stories (they’re all in one place, on my Yahoo Finance author page) to get a feel for what I cover, and send relevant info. Send them only once. If it’s a bald appeal for publicity without much substance, don’t bother because you do more harm to your reputation than it’s probably worth (unless of course the client is paying enough to justifying trashing your reputation).
Have you ever found a good story via a press release?
John Biggs
, East Coast Editor, Tech Crunch
What annoys you about press releases?
They offer no context, no understanding of the receiver, and no story. They are literally the laziest thing a company can do.
What could PR people do to make them better?
Nothing.
Have you ever found a good story via a press release?
No.
Charles Fleming
, Editor, Company Town, Los Angeles Times
What annoys you about press releases?
What could PR people do to make them better?
The basics matter. Pitch me something that shows you know my publication and my area of coverage, and that you read it often enough to know that we ALREADY DID THIS STORY a week ago. And you can go ahead and surprise me by spelling my name correctly.
Have you ever found a good story via a press release?
Derek Thompson
, Senior Editor, The Atlantic
What annoys you about press releases?
What could PR people do to make them better?
Have you ever found a good story via a press release?
Jason Gilbert
, Senior Editor, Yahoo! Tech
What annoys you about press releases?
What could PR people do to make them better?
Fix all of the things above! And press releases, unlike pitch emails, should be thorough. We’re looking for all of the information about this new product or study or whatever that we can find so that we can determine if it’s worth digging deeper into. Links to websites with even more information are great, too. And you HAVE to have contact information at the end. And not just that, but you better be REPLYING to those contacts quickly, too. Don’t add an email address you never check, or a phone number for a line you never answer!
Have you ever found a good story via a press release?
All the time! Especially from universities and smaller companies that don’t have the bandwidth to send out email blasts or hire a PR firm. Most journalists I know regularly check newswires for new announcements.
So the good news: it’s possible to land a good story via press release, but it must be very well-written, targeted to the right reporter, sent with a specific story idea via the headline, and you may also have to get lucky. The bad news: press releases may not be the right format for most reporters and sometimes, as Rick Newman noted, you won’t get the article you envisioned.