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If
you’re planning an event you want publicity, and if you just
carried out some activity where no one from the media was there, you
still want people to know what happened. To achieve this, you issue
a press release. But you’re not alone: editors receive hundreds of
press releases every week, and most end up in the bin. You're up
against formidable competition, often by professional public
relations firms, so no matter how relevant the issues you want to
draw attention to, if your press release doesn’t grab the
editor’s attention, the public will never hear any of it.
Before
you get down to writing and sending your press release, there are a
few other points to consider. Whom are you aiming at? It is obvious
that a motoring magazine doesn’t want to hear about computing
technology, but often the choice is not quite that straight forward.
You may have two local papers, but they often want exclusives and
don’t want to print what the other one has already covered. So you
have to decide which paper to send your release to unless you feel
it is important enough to get picked up by both. You should also
consider how and when to send it. If you send your release by email,
don’t use attachments but put everything in the body of the
message. Often fax is still a more effective way of sending a
release. You should time your release such that it fits the
paper’s publishing deadlines and you need to consider whether the
issue you are writing about is already being discussed in public or
relatively unknown and needs better introduction, whether already
too much has been said about it, and it might need a different and
fresh angle. Finally, before you send the release, make sure that
you have people ready to deal with interviews and follow-ups and
that they all sing from the same hymn sheet. There is no point
sending a good press release and then letting yourself down once the
paper or radio station has picked up on the news.
Another
caution is that if the media want the story you told them about,
they will call you
(provided you have included your contact details). Don’t follow it
up with your own call on whether they got your release; it will
definitely get you in their bad books.
When
writing your press release it must both be a short summary of your
story as well as substantial enough for the media to take and quote
directly from it, even if they don’t want to talk to you for
further comments. Technical jargon should be avoided unless for a
specialist publication, and you must avoid sounding like you’re
selling yourself or your ideas. There is no point either in stating
the obvious or making value judgments, like that your event was
unique or the greatest ever. Unless you or your group are known
well, a brief introduction to who you are must also be included, but
not the whole history of previous activities.
A
good press release should be two pages at most, but one should do
for most cases, and it must start with a meaningful headline. As
with a newspaper headline this grabs the attention of the editor and
helps him/her make up their mind whether to read on or not. The
headline, in about ten words or less, should summarise the contents
of the press release in an exciting way, and is then followed by the
first paragraph which sets out your stall. As much as possible all
the who, what, when, where, why and how should be crammed in the
first paragraph of the body of your press release. From there
onwards, you add additional relevant information in the order of the
most important first, so that the editor can cut the release from
the end without losing any critical information. In this section you
can include quotations, personalise the story, or include anything
which makes the item more newsworthy for the reader. Here you will
also include photo opportunities, reactions, or anything which links
the item you write about to other events.
Finally,
in the third part of your press release you may repeat the essential
points very briefly, if the release is of the more lengthy type, and
must add complete contact details to enable the paper to get in
touch with you, that is contact name, address, phone number, email
address, website URL. Make sure that the people at the other end of,
let’s say the phone, know that the media might call and are both
able and willing to answer questions. Again, the timing is
important. There is no point issuing a release shortly before you
are about to leave for a meeting and will be unavailable for
comments.
In
this last section you can also mention and photo material you might
have for publication. If you send a report of a past event, you
should, of course, already include pictures, but if you fax or
email, then simply have them ready should they be called for.
Lastly,
your press release should be proof-read carefully, and you might
want to check with somebody who was not involved in writing it how
it comes across. There is nothing worse than a release with apparent
mistakes or, perhaps, a misprinted contact number. It will have you
sitting at the end of the phone for hours wondering why nobody calls
back.
Author: Islamic
Party of
Britain |
Date Published:
Spring 2003 |
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