How to Write a Press Release: Don't Write One

There are many articles claiming they can teach you how to write an irresistible press release. There are PR coaches who can webinar you into writing winning releases. Yet it turns out – at least according to a recent Business Wire breakfast panel – that the best press release is none at all. Editors hate press releases.

That was the consensus brought to a room of young -- and now thoroughly shocked -- PR professionals by three print editors – of a daily, a weekly, and a monthly – and one TV reporter.

The Monthly Editor can’t deal with emails at all. Too bad they were invented. She prefers phone calls.  The Daily Editor says, “Email has hurt the PR industry.” He gets too many. We have become fat and lazy, pressing our Send button over and over.  We need to tailor each email for each editor. Email subject lines should say, “Greg, Open This,” for his name is Greg. Not Gregory, even though that is the name on his placard at the panel table. If you call him Gregory, he will delete your reckless email, because anyone who knows him knows he answers to Greg.

Weekly Editor says if he sees “For Immediate Release,” he deletes it immediately. That is too cliché. So Lois Lane. We need to rise above that. It means everyone in the media is getting it at the same time, and to him, that is not a story of interest. The TV Reporter agrees. She hates “email bombs,” when the same press release hits all the mail accounts in the newsroom at the same time. They delete them without reading them! Delete! Delete! High five!

All the panelists had a specific time of day when they may possibly be available to take your phone call (because after all that, you are not sending emails, right?)

Do not call or email the TV Reporter or Daily Editor after 4 p.m. They are on deadline. They do not want to be bothered. The Weekly Editor is on deadline Friday and Monday. He won’t even answer his phone then! Don’t pretend to be his mother!

The TV Reporter says here’s a secret for you. We love Direct Messages on Twitter. (DMs, if you know your way around Twitter.) All the TV reporters chatter all day long on Twitter, which is true since I follow a lot of them. They tweet each other when they’re sitting next to each other in the newsroom. And they don’t get that many DMs. DMs pop up on their phones instantly! So your press release needs to be 140 characters or less now to send a DM.

Also – sorry to spoil the party, but -- if the reporter isn’t following you, you can’t DM them.

Press releases, if you persist in this foolishness, need to be “extremely well-written and attention-getting.” Your lead is not your boss’ name and title and the fact that he has announced something. Your lead is what he announced. (Your boss will not agree.) They do not need that boilerplate quote in the second paragraph from the boss. They only need to know what exact time he will be sitting by his phone available to answer questions.

Press releases “are gobbledegook; the lead is buried. I’d rather just have bullet points,” says Greg. (My friend, you know, because I call him Greg!)

They hate it when no one can talk to the media until the press release is released. That’s just old fashioned. If you want to connect, you need to reach out to an editor ahead of the press release.

In fact, you need to make friends with reporters and editors. Call them at the appropriate time just to congratulate them on stories that have nothing to do with you. Ask how you can help them. Offer yourself up as a comment source on other stories. Send bagel baskets. Find out where they drink after work.

They all hate attachments. First we have the audacity of thinking we are worthy of the editors opening our email in the first place, and then we task them with opening an attachment! Which could be in a program they can’t even open anyway! What is wrong with putting your news in the body of the email? (I happen to agree with this. A pox on attachments!)

Don’t toy with them with embargoes and exclusives. “We just laugh,” said Weekly Editor, although TV Reporter is so eager for preparation time before she has to go live, she’s actually partial to embargoes. “The worst thing for us is a podium in a room. It doesn’t relate to viewers,” she says.

Oh, how they hate the Podium in the Room. The dry announcement. The officials standing in a semi-circle behind the speaker, hands clasped in front of them. Then the floor is thrown open for questions. No TV reporter wants to ask their brilliantly crafted question and then all the other TV stations get to record the answer! So they don’t ask questions. They wait to rush up to the spokesman after he steps away from the Podium in the Room.

“Think about visuals,” says Daily Editor. “We all have websites that use visuals.”

Those websites and tablet and phone apps are the biggest challenge for the print editors. They have to hire tech guys now to make them. They have to figure this all out. Then they have to figure out how to make us pay for it. They have to learn how to feed the social media beast with fewer personnel.

I rarely see a print representative at these seminars say they are doomed. The Daily Editor boldly declares “print will still be around 30 years from now,” a safe statement since neither he nor I will be around to call him out on it.

Then they opened the floor to questions and the PR professionals tried to think of new ways to sneak their news into the media.

Expert columns?

Nope. They’re too often written above the average reader’s head (which for most print, is 7th to 9th grade). It takes too much time to edit them down.

Next question: But I called and called and called you, Ye Who Put Stock in Personal Phone Calls, and you don’t return my calls. How is calling better?

Then Daily Editor suddenly reverses himself on the email position. “I find emails better because I can answer them at 11 o’clock at night.”

Wait, what? What was that? So emails are good now? You actually don’t have time to answer our calls either? I swing around to see if the fresh faced PR pros sitting behind me are thoroughly confused, if hands are shooting up, but they are still stunned about all the deleting and ignoring they just heard. No one calls shenanigans!

Next question: What is the real relationship between account executives and editors? When we talk to editors, should we mention our account executive? Should we mention what a big advertiser we are?

No! No! No! They will hang up on you. They will laugh. They will ignore your email bombs and your attachments, and your ill-timed calls. There is no relationship whatsoever between advertising and news, even in these dire financial times.

I hear this from news people all the time, and every time I write about it, I mention my own personal experience as an editor and reporter when, yes, the publisher actually did care very much about advertisers. The publisher, with the Managing Editor on a short leash trotting right behind, would come storming down the hallway into my office to tell me to play nice or kill a story or cover a story. Yes, they did. When an advertiser made threats, all hell actually would break loose. (Maybe not on the Hanover Herald Progress under the late Jay Pace. I heard he was different. But they made a lot of their money printing other people’s papers.)

But every time I say this, everyone says I am wrong, delusional, crazy. That doesn’t happen where I work, they say, even when it turns out I worked for the same company they do now. The trick is, PR people, you don’t ever say anything to a news editor about being an advertiser. If they treat you mean, then you tell your account executive, who tells the sales manager, who tells the vice president of sales, who tells the executive editor, who tells the managing editor, who releases the Kraken on that section editor’s ass, because the times, they are tough. Even so. Amen.

Okay, quick, how many times did I make an outdated Kraken reference? No peeking!

(Also, not included here is the devastating tale one editor told of thoroughly humiliating and demeaning a Florida restaurant owner who thought he might be interested in her new restaurant opening in "the area," only to find out it was opening in Reston, and he made sure she knew what an ignorant waste of his time she was in the most scathing, long drawn out way.

"Have you ever heard of the Internet?"

"Have you ever heard of Google maps?"

"Have you ever looked at a map?"

"Do you realize Reston is NOWHERE NEAR RICHMOND?"

There was time for that phone call. You could have heard a pin drop in the room. Maybe it would have played better at the Funny Bone.)