News Releases

News Releases [Print, Electronic, and Video

A news release is best looked at as a form of organizational journalism. Like a news story, it must answer the basic, but simple questions the five Ws of journalism: Who, What, When, Where, Why, and, if known, How:

• Who is the story about? Who is the mains person or people involved in the story? Who can mean a organizational or even a department as well as a person. But people like to about people, not organizations, so make sure that there are people in the news release.

• What happened to Who, or what did Who do? This is the “Action” of the story, the verb in the sentence. As we all know, you cannot have a sentence without a verb—or a story without action.
• When did it happen? If it happened last year, the media probably won’t care. It has to be “current.”
• Where did it happen? The media is usually ore interested in stories that either happened in their circulation—or viewer ship—area than in stories that happened outside of it. If it did happen outside of that area, how does it affect the people who are inside of it?
• Why did it happen? There had to be a reason.
• How did it happen? What led up to it? What was the underlying motive or cause?

Reporters work to present news in as simple a way as possible because they know that their readers, viewers and listeners have other things to do, and that they have to fight myriad distractions to get and keep their attention.

The easier—simpler—you can make the reporter’s job, the better your chances are of the reporter producing a story that meets your needs.

While there are no guarantees, History has shown that those people who provide the media with everything the media need and wants tend to get more positive coverage than those who don’t.

One way to do this is to hand them more than a news release. You might want to hand them a package that includes material the release is based on, or background information on the people, products, or issues that the release deals with.

Most project/programme purpose reports have an executive summary, which is usually all that many of the people handed the report ever really read. Some will read at least sections of the report to get more information.

A news release can be looked at as an executive summary. While many reporters will never get past the release, a surprising number will want more details and information.

If you do not provide it, they will go elsewhere for it, which could be your competitors, or a government or regulatory agency, or to your critics.

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6. Writing a News Release

The most important sentence you write in a news release is the first one. If you don’t get an editor’s interest, the editor will very likely throw your news release away for two simple reasons:

1. Editors are not required to read what you write.
2. Editors have hundreds of other news releases to go through.

The way to write a news release is the same way a reporter writes a story. The process is the same.

The basic formula of news reporting is the inverted pyramid. It calls for putting the most important information at the top of the story. In this way people who have time to only “scan” the news find out what they need to know in the first sentence and then decide if they want, need, or have time to read the rest of the story.

In many cases, an editor might be interested in only the basic facts of the story, and that is all they will use, but if they have to wade through three pages to find it, they will not bother.

Getting the first three paragraphs of your three-page story into a national paper might not be as “good” as getting all three pages into it—but it sure beats not getting anything into the paper at all.

One of the reasons that people are made editors and give the power to make these decisions is that they know what their readers are interested in. If an editor is not interested in the story, the odds are that their readers aren’t, either. So writing to please an editor is the same as writing to please the final reader.

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 See also

Get to Know Your Local Media  The media play a major role in spreading—or blocking and misinterpreting—your messages to the outside world. As a rule, you will have the most luck getting to know your local media, but there are ways to get to know at least some of the others as well. Get to know as many reporters as you can, and how they operate. Figure out what you can do to make their jobs easier. The better informed the media are, the more likely they are to be accurate and thorough.

Use the Media to Deliver Your Message   The media provide the primary channel you will have to use to get many of your messages out to the public. You have to learn how to target your messages to the media in general and to the different types of media that you will deal with. The trade media have different interests and requirements than a national news magazine. Weekly newspapers are different from daily papers, and TV is different from radio. Individual newspapers in the same city sometimes have distinctly different styles and interests. A major city might have one paper aimed at people in project/programme purpose, and another aimed at everyone else.

Going Around the Media   Just because the news media is the primary way to get your information to the outside world does not mean it is the only one. There are ways to circumvent the news media and deal directly with the audiences that you are trying to reach. Despite the risk of media criticism, there are definitely times when it is the best way to make sure that your message gets out to the public exactly the way you want to present it. Of course, you have to learn when going around the media is practical and desirable, and when it isn’t.