When you need to get your message out, advertising is often the first place that individuals and businesses alike turn. While paid commercial announcements can be a great way to communicate with the public, they also are easy to skip over or tune out. It can be much more effective to have your announcement told as part of a news story, where the audience will encounter your message without even realizing it. But how do you get the media to stand up and take notice of your announcement? That’s where press releases come in. Press releases inform the media about what is going on and help them write the story you want told.
The art of writing a press release take a little practice. We’ve put together a guide to help you turn your announcement into a powerful press release that will have the media calling.
- Have something to say. Too many press releases announce nothing of consequence or importance, and nothing that general readers will care about. If you want the media to cover your story, you need to have something important to say. Telling them that Cynthia in accounting got promoted to vice president of accounting might interest Cynthia’s mother, but will your customers, clients, or investors care? If the answer is “no,” save it for the company newsletter. News organizations get thousands of press releases a week, and they will discard any that don’t have something interesting to say.
- Put the news first. Don’t try to be coy about what you are telling your readers. If you bury the important news five paragraphs in, you have lost 90% of your readers. Start with the most important facts first. These should come right in the opening paragraph, which needs to tell your readers the five W’s and H: who, what, where, when, why, and how. If they read only the first paragraph, they should know the whole story.
- Offer some quotes from key figures. Reporters love quotes, and they want to be able to include some words from the actual people involved in the story, not just a PR rep. Whenever possible, include 1-2 substantive quotations from principal figures. In many cases, you can script these yourself and get approval from the people involved to attribute them to those people. Just be sure that the quotes have some substance to them. “This is great” is not a great quote. Specific, detailed, and positive should govern any quotes you use.
- Provide all the details that reporters will need. In many cases, the press release will be the only research that a reporter will do in writing the story, especially if it is not headline news. Make it easy on reporters by giving them exactly what they need. That means that you need to give all the details about your subject, background on the issue, and a description of the people involved as well as a brief history of your company or organization. Imagine you are writing a news story—because you are—and provide all the facts that would go into a good newspaper story about your announcement. Arrange them from most important to least important, ending with the company history. This is called “inverted pyramid” format and is the standard way that news stories are constructed.
- Follow Associated Press format. On a related note, you should try to make it as easy as possible for reporters to recycle your press release into an article. That means that you should use the Associated Press style book, the same one that reporters for most major newspapers use. This will make it easy for reporters to cut and paste with minimal effort. AP style governs such style points as how and where to punctuate, when to use numerals vs. writing out numbers, etc.
Many larger organizations have their own press release writing services or work with a dedicated public relations firm to write their press releases. But for smaller organizations, doing it yourself is likely the only option. This guide should help to make sure that your press releases will meet the expectations of the reporters you’re trying to reach so you’ll be more likely to get great results and see your announcement turned into a story for your local newspaper, radio station, or TV station.