4. Writing a Damn Good Press Release

The angle

• First of all, what is the brief for the story? And, more importantly, is it interesting? Get hold of some of the magazines or papers the client wants to get coverage in and see if you can imagine this story being given space in them.
• If you are lucky, you may find there is a ready-made slot for the kind of news your client is touting. Many trade magazines, for example, have appointments columns where you can place stories about the latest corporate-climbing exploits in your client’s business.
• If that is the case, write your announcement in a style that closely resembles the slot it will go into. Use a similar word count to make the editor’s job as easy as possible. But include as much supplementary information as you can, in a ‘Notes to editors’ section (see below).
• If you are even luckier, your client’s announcement may be important enough to qualify as real news in its own right. The client may have discovered the secret of nuclear fusion, for example, or invented a way to stop toast falling with the buttered side down. If this is the case, your intro should tell the story as simply and succinctly as possible. But it is rarely the case.
• More often than not, press releases are of the form: ‘Company X is pleased to announce its new line of widgets’. Announcements of such earth-shattering insignificance will usually be lucky to make it to the waste-paper bin, let alone the front page. Before you sit down to write a straight release on anything of this ilk, consider the following. Companies need to launch new products to stay in business. They are supposed to win contracts. They are expected to form partnerships. In fact, most of what your client may claim is ‘news’ is actually to do with things that the business should be doing anyway. So why would it be remotely interesting to an editor?
• If your announcement is one of the 99.9 per cent of announcements that fall into this category, you need to look for ways to elevate it beyond the ordinary. Lateral thinking can help here. Is there an angle to what your client is doing that is quite unusual? Is it an industry or market first, or last, or biggest, or smallest? Will the announcement have wider repercussions? One of the reasons I used cod as an example in the previous chapter is because I once had to elevate a story about the fish in some work I did for WWF, the global environment network. The story was actually about a new campaign to raise awareness of falling stocks, which in itself was not big news (since campaigning is what organisations like WWF are supposed to do). So, to make it more relevant to the public, I proposed an announcement placing cod ‘n’ chips, one of Britain’s national dishes, on the endangered species list. There was some poetic licence involved, of course, since a menu item cannot technically be declared an endangered species, but WWF went along with the conceit and the resulting release was interesting enough to editors to make the story an agenda item the day it went out.

Style and content

• Once you have nailed your angle, if it is a good one, you may be tempted to use all sorts of Sun -style puns in your headline and introduction. Don’t. Remember, your press release is not the story; it is the background to a story. Leave all the clever word-play to the journalists. The one thing they hate worse than a PR is a wise-guy PR. Simply spell out your story with an intro of 25 words or less, using words of no more than three syllables. That takes a lot more skill than writing any number of puns.
• Also avoid using phrases such as ‘thought to’ or ‘poised to’ for purely stylistic purposes. While the press is at liberty to report on speculation and rumour, the purpose of a press release is to impart facts.
• Next, back up your intro with as much information as you think can be possibly relevant. Include facts, figures, amounts, dates, locations and references. Again, stick to simple words and short sentences. One point per sentence or paragraph, in order of decreasing importance.
• Make sure the salient points are easy to read and can be picked out simply by scanning the copy. Use bullet points or numbered lists where they will help with clarity.

Page numbers and quotes

• If your press release is more than one page long, indicate that there is a second page with ‘cont . . .’ for ‘continued’, ‘m/f’ for ‘more follows’ or ‘1/2’ for one page out of two. Some press releases still get faxed to editors, who will need to know if one of the pages has got lost.
• If your press release is more than two pages long, look again to see if you have included too much information. Most busy editors will not plough beyond the first page anyway. If necessary, take some of the less interesting stuff out of the main body of the release and include it as background in bullet points on the final sheet.
• All press releases should carry a quote from a named (and titled) spokesperson, but leave it until the end of the press release. Nine times out of ten, a journalist will try to speak to someone directly to get an original quote, so the purpose of the quote in the press release is simply to provide a backup.
• Make sure, nevertheless, that the quote bears at least some vague resemblance to spoken English. Many press release quotes end up full of marketing-speak or techno-babble and cannot even be used as a backup.

Finishing off

• At the end of the story, write ‘Ends’ and centre it on the page so that it is obvious. If you do not, some poor editorial assistant could end up hunting around the fax machine looking for another sheet of paper (and they won’t thank you for it).
• Then include the names, phone numbers and email addresses of at least two people who can be contacted for more information. (Email addresses are optional; phone numbers are not.)
• There is a good argument for including these contact details on the first page, too, if space and layout will permit.
• There may be information which is not relevant to your story but which needs to be included for legal reasons, or to conform to house style; many companies insist on a short paragraph, called a ‘boilerplate’, which describes their business and is unchanged from one press release to another. This information should be included in bullet points under the heading ‘Notes to editors’, at the end of the main release. Feel free to include as much background information in this section as you like; it can often come in handy when a journalist needs to pad out a story.