The news release, pitch letter and pitch phone call are the most important keys to gaining media coverage. Yet most of these media encounters are squandered due to some basic mistakes.
This story details the five best tips for making each PR product more effective.
I have waited my whole life for this day: Oct. 17, 2018, Canada becomes the first Western country to allow full marijuana legalization, medical and recreational.
In the social media and mobile age, observing space limitations and compressing copy becomes more and essential. We are writing for phones and even watches, and no one wants to read excessive copy. In this example, from Cision, the company that checks social media reach and distributes news releases, the PR Writer reduced the headline, lead and supporting paragraphs from 196 to 147 words.
This news release just made me throw up my hands and wonder for the thousandth time, how is it that people pay PR newswires good money to distribute bad news releases? I didn’t apply PR Writer techniques to this one, except in a few places because simply pointing out what was substandard was criticism enough.
In this PR Writer commentary, the use of ‘you’ to address the reader is unnecessary and can easily be eliminated without changing news release meaning.
As much as the PR Writer supports this project, the news release violates a fundamental media relations principle—the lead ignores the headline. The lead should recapitulate the headline, which it does not do until the third paragraph.
After living in Canada for some time, these are some ideas Americans never quite get about Canadian politics. The fight over Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court never occurs in a Parliamentary system, when there is a majority government. The PM and the cabinet select nominees without opposition and they are then appointed and begin work immediately.
In this crazy time in U.S. politics, many Canadians look south of the border media, and wonder ‘what the hell is going on,’ as the system is very puzzling, even though they know a great deal about it (more than Americans will ever know about Canada). For Canadians, here are the five most puzzling aspects of the U.S. system.
In media relations, reporters are like the person next to you in the lively bar. Inundated with news releases, they develop an exquisite sensibility for the caller’s credibility and can tell instantly if a pitch letter
will work.
Almost as if she is a PR program graduate or agency veteran, Stormy Daniels has applied the most essential media relations techniques to keep her story alive. She hardly needs a PR writer.