bout de papier, Vol. 6, No. 4 (1989), pp. 10–11
I would love to meet the civil servants who troll the halls of government departments inspecting press releases to make sure they’re boring. They must exist, because the average public sector press release reads like this:
FREDERICTON, N.B., Feb. 12, 1989: The Hon. H.E.M. Locke, federal minister responsible for trees and the member for Whispering Pine, Ontario, along with the Hon. Bruce Spudworm, provincial minister responsible for land and the member for Dulce Bay announced today a federal/ provincial cost sharing agreement to stimulate and advance the scientific…
BORING! I have asked why they don’t try something like this:
“I’m delighted with the progress we’ve made,” says the Hon. H.E.M. Locke…
My clients in the federal public sector say they actually must follow written guidelines that require writing in this style. Yet at least one person in the Privy Council Office says no such guidelines exist and if they do, they do not have to be followed verbatim. Somebody isn’t talking to somebody.
One federal agency told me they send out 200 press releases a year and not one is picked up by the media. The result is often waste and a message which does not reach the public. There are better ways to write a press release and promote productive relations with the media.
The Release William Parkhurst (How to Get Publicity, Times Books, 1985) is right when he says the press release is the most important document in your media relations. He suggests the writer start by asking a lot of questions that begin with the traditional 5 Ws and H. Who will benefit? What is being done that’s new? When will results show? Where will be the greatest impact? Why is this being done now? How will it work?
There’s more to it than Parkhurst suggests though. Having articulated all the elements of the story, these must be sifted through a matrix of standard journalistic criteria such as timeliness, proximity, number of people affected, lasting importance and so on. Generally, stories which are brand new, nearby, affect many people and will have lasting historical importance are the most newsworthy. The point is illustrated by gauging the changing importance of a seemingly inconsequential two car fender-bender outside a radio and TV station in a big city. It doesn’t sound newsworthy, but add some of the following elements and the situation changes:
- It happened 30 seconds before newstime and a reporter happened to get a great sound recording of the cars colliding.
- One of the drivers was dressed as a clown on his way to the circus.
- One car was a police cruiser.
- It happened two nights ago, but there is spectacular film of the cars colliding and knocking over the TV newsman.
- It happened 10 years ago.
- It happened 10 years ago, and it has just come to light that one of the drivers was Pierre Trudeau.
- It happened 10 years ago. One driver was Pierre Trudeau and the other was Brian Mulroney.
You have a picture. Call the New York Times. You’re rich.
Most things can be newsworthy in the right context. The communications professional’s job is contextualization. The 5 Ws and H must be constantly weighted against standard journalistic criteria and competing stories in a moving matrix. Highlight one aspect and play down another. It is like juggling on roller skates on a moving train. When you get it right, you’re not only having fun, but really going places too.
Having decided the most newsworthy angle, you must write a lead, or first sentence. Parkhurst lists some of the types including the question, quotation and humourous leads. There are also shotgun, rifle, umbrella, split, historical, geographic and others detailed in any good journalistic style book.
I agree with whoever said that good writing is just good talking put on paper. One thought per sentence, present tense, active voice and the transmission of simple word pictures are the foundation of clear communication. The release must have a straight spine. The writer must be taking the reader someplace and not deviate. You must start at A and logically end at Z and not divert to math when you promised to deliver the alphabet. This concept of simplicity, or “journalism as form letter’ is the hardest concept for students of journalism or PR to grasp. They all want to be Hemmingway because he once wrote news.
Above all, ask yourself, “who cares?” If you can’t picture a nurse, policeman, taxi driver, unemployed labourer, professor or others being interested, then re-write it. So, instead of writing “A Canadian traveler was rescued by a consular official…” you might try, “Joe Smith, who normally handles minor passport and visa problems for Canadians abroad, became a hero to at least one family today…”
Format There is a study I like to cite that shows that the average human resources manager looks at the average unsolicited resume for 14 seconds. I suspect the same is true of press releases. A stack of one hundred releases in newsrooms where I used to work was not uncommon, but neither was the fact that 90 if them were single spaced, had no date, had no contact person, were boring or had other faults that eliminated them from contention. Basic format rules are as follows:
- Leave generous margins all around.
- Use your organization’s stationery.
- Banish mundane procedural data and get quickly into the headline and body.
- Type ’for immediate release’ or ’not for release before 2 p.m.’ and the date in the upper right hand corner. Don’t squander your 14 seconds on extraneous facts.
- Use a short, grabby headline typed in capitals.
- Write in conversational, journalistic style (consult a style book).
- Avoid boring details. Try starting with a quote and list dates, places and other details further down.
- Double or triple space.
- Tell the whole story, even if it takes 2 or 3 pages. (It will be thrown out if you haven’t interested the reporter in the first paragraph, but having done so, you must do a complete job.)
- End with the traditional marks -30followed by ’for further information contact Fred Bloggs…’ and a phone number.
Hooks If the editor looks up from your release and asks, “What does this have to do with the price of tea in China?”, you don’t have a hook. Hooks are reasons for doing the story, today, in this way. Unusual things, human interest and striking photographs are special cases where the hook may be the story itself. A two-headed calf story is news anytime and has to run when discovered.
Obvious hooks are the piggyback kind. National implications of loca! stories, local angles to international stories, and your reaction to a continuing story are examples. The easiest are time hooks. A calendar will give you lots of story ideas. People travel at Christmas, March break and in the summer. They start school in September and end it in April or June. There is more unemployment in the winter than in the summer and seasonable types of employment at all times. The weather patterns change about every 3 months and there are a couple of dozen holidays or anniversaries per year. Your organization can plug into a good dozen of these events and piggyback on existing media awareness/interest. In this way, you may even be able to make routine releases of upcoming events, personnel changes and statement of position interesting.
What Else Do You Send?
Releases do not take the place of media tours, private interviews, public service announcements, background briefings, conferences, letters to the editor, and other tools. Moreover, the mailing of a release is a good excuse to send other material. A recent clipping about your organization or on a topic related to your release signals to the media that you are newsworthy. Biographies, cover letters, question and answer sheets (Q and As), transcripts of recent electronic interviews, photos, lists of recent media appearances, company brochures or annual reports all can make a professional press kit.
To the media, a well run communications department signals a well run organization. In times of crisis or controversy, you will be judged, in part, on how professional your communication was during average times.
To Whom Do You Send?
“But we always send to the CBC and they never cover us” says a client. “How did you address the release?” I ask. “The Editor, CBC, Box 500 Stn. A, Toronto, says the complaining client.
The CBC has about 28 buildings in Toronto housing AM, FM, TV, French and English. Each public affairs show has an ’editor’, as do the national radio and TV and local radio and TV newsrooms. You need to send 15 releases to CBC alone. There are also 1,500 other AM & FM radio stations in Canada, 130 TV stations, 700 cable systems, 700 business publications with 7 million monthly readers, 850 weekly newspapers with a circulation of 3.3 million and 116 daily newspapers with 5.5 million readers.
I get frustrated when professional communicators say the media is lazy, out to get them and won’t cover their events for ideological reasons, and they say their press list contains all of 80 names for the whole country. Media bashing is a smoke screen for inaction. A trip to the library will generate many complete lists, starting with the “Matthews” list of all Canadian media organizations and outlets.
Media ’Etiquette’ Parkhurst actually breathes a little life into the old cliche of the freeloading reporter who shows up to the press conference because there is food. There may also be crooked politicians, bureaucrats who sleep on the job and industrialists who knowingly poison ground water. But what do these cliches tell us about effective media, government or industrial relations? Just to put the chestnut to rest, when a journalist is covering 4 stories between 10 AM and 4:30 PM all over town, he or she often has to eat on the run.
Simple etiquette rules will help your media campaign:
- Treat reporters like regular people under pressure to get a story.
- Brief them well. Then do it again.
- Don’t say you have ’news’, say you have some information and let the reporter do his job in deciding if it is news.
- Don’t thank a reporter. That implies he has done you a favour which is unethical. Say his story was interesting, clear or timely.
- A call before the release goes out to alert the reporter is helpful: A call afterwards is pushy.
Communication Plan While practitioners should be de-mystifying the media relations process for senior managers, there is too often a sense that more gobbleygook and planning is an end in itself. Planning has its place but the fact is often forgotten that planning is not actually doing anything. It is just planning to do something and does not take the place of real and appropriate action. Better to send out one so-so press release than to write up a plan that has 10 full media kits going out each quarter, but is never implemented.
Finally…
The world is as it is, not as it should be. The media, warts and all, exist. Don’t waste time trying to reform the media — change your approach. The newsmakers’ job is to know everything about media deadlines, style, foibles, values, ethics, needs and what makes news. All the rest is just plain work.
Further Help Each book is rated out of 10:
Comber, Mary Anne & Robert S. Mayne, The Newsmongers, McClelland and Stewart, 1986 (7)
Gans, Herbert J., Deciding What’s News, Vintage Books/Random House, N.Y., 1980 (10)
Housman, Carl & Philip Benoit, Do Your Own Public Relations, Tab Books, Blue Ridge Summit, PA., 1983 (4)
Hilton, Jack, How to Meet the Press, Dodd, Mead & Company, N.Y., 1987 (5)
Mickiewicz, Ellen Propper, Media and the Russian Public, Praeger, N.Y., 1981 (7)
Schmertz, Herb, Good-Bye to the Low Profile, Little, Brown, Boston, 1986 (6.5)
Siegel, Gonnie McClung, How to Advertise and Promote Your Small Business, Wiley, N.Y., 1978 (4)
Zenker, Arnold, Mastering the Public Spotlight, Dodd, Mead & Company, N.Y., 1983 (6.5)
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 6, No. 4 (1989), pp. 10–11. Read the rest of this issue →
