How I met Pele and almost lost my PR job.
Today’s post covers three headlines and leads. All make basic errors in PR, journalism and style and demonstrate poor news judgment, all sins in ThePRWriter’s humble opinion.
The PR Writer, and newswire scourage, is back at it again, after some absence critiquing misguided PR copy.
As mushrooms and psychedelics are becoming ‘the next big thing,’ the press release writing is equally poor, if not worse. In this news release, the news judgment and the story emphasis is abysmal and full of so many extra words.
n the PR Writer’s last PR Tools post, I called out the OMA’s writing for excessive use of ‘you’ in the copy. Some have asked, why is it important to edit out? Two reasons:
Addressing readers is irrelevant as they know they are reading something from the writer.
‘You’ and ‘yours’ are extraneous words that can almost always edited out, saving on copy. There are better ways to express content.
I am continually amazed at how first rate organizations like the Ontario Medical Association pay good money to newswires to distribute such flawed news releases. The copy below commits numerous fundamental errors, including word repeats that can easily be avoided. Here’s how:
I am mourning Alex Trebek, along with the rest of the Jeopardy community, and everyone else. I mourn him in a special way, as I was a Jeopardy contestant. Along with a University of Toronto prof whom I contacted after he competed, I must be at most among the two or three contestants in Toronto.
In this new PRTools press release recap, there are several important writing tips, a really…
In this second PR Tools installment from PR newswires, this U.S. story demonstrates even more ineptitude and carelessness than Canadian counterparts. The headline is a mistake-riddled doozy.
n this edition of PR Tools, once again, you need not look long and hard to find press releases crying out for basic edits and reduced word counts. Easy-to-correct mistakes abound in these two news releases, one from Canada’s newswire.ca today and the other from prnewswire.com in the U.S. in the next post.