Researching Press Releases

How to write a press release and what to include

 

 

A press release is a written statement to the media. They can announce a range of news items, including scheduled events, personnel promotions, awards, new products and services, sales accomplishments, etc.

 

"You have maybe five seconds to get a journalist's attention," Bergstrom said. "They swim in a sea of e-mail,
wading through hundreds of press releases every day. Why make them scroll past junk to find your headline and story? It only annoys them into hitting DELETE. "The second mistake is having a long, boring headline.
"Your headline has to sing, and it should fit in the subject line of your e-mail," Bergstrom said. "Try for eight words, max, and you'll avoid a double-decker sandwich of blah."

The third mistake is in trying to cram every press release into the 500-word mould.
"Open the newspaper and find the section your story would fit," Bergstrom said. "If you hire a new employee, your release should be about two paragraphs with a black-and-white photo. If you're opening a new business in a small town, you could go a lot longer than normal, maybe 900-word release with three or four photos."

1) Photos are your secret weapon.
Papers are always short on photos. Some papers, especially weeklies, still have slow Internet connections. Sending them 20 megabytes of photos in an e-mail may make them remember you in a bad way, so post your photos someplace like flickr.com and include links to the photos at the end of the release.

2) Short press releases work.
A common example is a release about a meeting. A newspaper won't run a 500-word story about the regular monthly meeting of the Rotary Club -- but they will run a two-sentence brief publicizing the meeting in the calendar section. If you're having a famous speaker, sure, then you can do a full press release and send a photo.
Radio and TV won't run your press release at all. They might read a one-paragraph version on the air, so it makes a lot of sense to condense your release into a paragraph for radio and local TV.

3) Send it to a person, not the slush pile.
The final place people trip up is when they hit SEND. Instead of emailing it your release to the generic address newspapers use as a slush pile -- it's usually something like news@localnewspaper.com -- find the editor of the section your story would fit. If it's a business story, send your release to the business editor directly.
Send the release one by one instead of blasting it out to everybody in the TO line of your e-mail.
Will these things take a little more time? Yes. But you'll get much better results. Press releases and guest columns are called "earned media" because you're not paying the newspaper to run something. You have to work hard to beat the competition and earn the right to get published.

(Source: http://marketing.about.com/od/publicrelation1/a/howtowritepr.htm)