Press Releases Refused To Die. Now, I Am Glad They Didn’t
But you know what… I blow hot and cold on the things – more cold than hot, pretty Arctic at times. Most days, they just feel like that a remaining relic from the old hot metal, print, Old School PR strategy toolbox that’s still hanging on – but some recent positive, indeed surprisingly positive, press release action has given me some pause for thought.
At the same time – the world has changed. Time was, journalists received news in a trickle. Now it’s a firehose – very few reporters have time to read a bunch of releases to sort the wheat from the chaff – life isn’t like that, and we’re also communicating with them in so many different ways. Clients still like them, sure, even if journalists don’t – though they often generate them following that same old mindset, where they announce something and wait for interest. News just doesn’t happen that way now. I try and show clients they’re a bit of a blunt instrument. (There’s also the deadly issue of what a client thinks is headline-grabbing – “We’ve just opened an office in Grimsby” – is still there!)
A really critical one for me is that you’re supposed to use a release for big pieces of news for something that’s a really big deal about your company. You’d have thought your company being acquired by LinkedIn was such an example; you’d put a press release out about that. But when that company acquired our client Glint, that story was revealed on two LinkedIn posts by the CEOs of both companies…
I asked one freelance writer for his opinion on press releases. Here is what he, Gary Flood[1], said
“When I started off – on a paper weekly, how long ago that seems now! – we had a News Editor who just flicked through like 200, 300 releases and assigned the ones to you that she thought possibly relevant, and you slimmed that pile down to more like 6 or 7. So even in ‘the good old days’, there was a lot that got discarded.
“These days, I will still use something like Google News to do the same job of filtering – and you know what, you’d be surprised at how close the published story is to the original vendor of government body PR. Journalism is on its uppers these days, so for News especially there’s no time for secondary sourcing or doing a call – the release is pretty much all you use now.”
I’m sure Gary is right, and I am just about to say that the PR, done well, should indeed be “all you use”. But I don’t really like pumping them out as the primary news-attention channel. We used to talk about them being really good for SEO or getting picked up by the news robots, but I think Google has sussed out the keyword-written press releases.