Not so long ago, when I was an editor at a daily newspaper, I received several hundred news releases and informal notes from the public each day.
Part of my morning routine was to take out the machete and carve a path through this thicket of emails, faxes and regular mail. I also did this on an ongoing basis throughout the day.
I had to go through the releases because I knew there would be real news in there. A good proportion of the topics that media organizations cover originate in such communication.
However, I did it very quickly because I had a lot of other things to accomplish than to just get through the mail. I once calculated that I’d spend maybe two or three hours a day just typing “Thank you, we’ve received your release,” if I responded to everybody. So, even though I’m a very polite person, senders seldom heard from me if I wasn’t interested.
The method I used – pretty standard I think within newsrooms – provides some insight for anyone trying to have their message heard and acted upon. Here’s what I did:
1. Glance at the subject line to see if I can delete it out of hand as clearly junk mail or uninteresting. “Vi***gra at cost” or “California Town Sets Cheese Eating Record!” That kind of thing. One or two seconds per email. Delete at least half – probably closer to 60 percent — at this point.
2. Scan the sender to see if it is an organization that deluges me with unimportant things every day. (People known to send me good tips get special, positive attention.) One or two seconds per email. Delete blocks of email from that sender. Toss the envelopes addressed to the business editor 30 years ago. Twenty percent discarded.
3. Read the headline and first paragraph quickly, using a mental checklist of what we’d consider newsworthy: Can this possibly have anything to do with my readers? Does it have the slightest chance of being interesting? Is it clearly old news? Are there errors that make me suspect the accuracy of the release? Is there something happening in the world that relates to this? Is the person intelligible, or is the writing so poor (or prose so purple) that it’d take me forever to figure out what they are saying? Perhaps 10-15 seconds per email. Discard more than half.
4. Pop to the bottom of the release in search of who is telling me this – the boilerplate – if the sender is not immediately clear or familiar to me. What is their political or economic purpose in putting out the release? Four seconds. Thirty percent get knocked out here.
5. Read the top half of the release, asking the same questions as in step three, only with more discernment. Step 3 question: Could it possibly be interesting? Step 5: Is it interesting? Maybe a minute. Probably 30 percent are junked here.
6. Consider whether you’ve told other people that something very similar is not news and how such items have been handled in the past. Thirty seconds. About 5 percent junked for that reason.
7. Decide how urgent it is. Do I have to act immediately on it, and if so, do I have the staff? Do I really care if the competition beats me on this piece of information? Anywhere from 20 seconds to a minute. Twenty percent are eliminated.
8. Determine how important it is and how to have it staffed: send it to a reporter as a brief, assign it as a story, launch a major investigative initiative, forward it to another editor or reporter (who will start this process at step 3), send it to a writer as a piece of some broader project. Could be 10 seconds to, in more-complicated situations, two minutes. Perhaps 60 percent of these make it into print in some fashion.
Even after being assigned or taken on by an individual reporter in step 8, the item might not make it to the light of day if bigger news calls the writer away, if they go home sick or if the information provided is not as-advertised when the reporting is done.
So, you see, a news release is a bit like a guppy trying to survive or, in this case, make its way on air or into print, in a very difficult environment.
Fortunately, the hardy ones do survive because they provide real news value and have been given a fighting chance by their creators: strong subject lines, relationships with media members, clear and compelling writing, story angles that people care about, timeframes that allow for as much planning as possible, follow up.
There’s never been a greater need for well-crafted news releases than today, when the information trickle has turned into a torrent.
— Eric Blom
Tags: Legacy Media, messaging, press releases, public relations
