I know. The traditional press release is dead – pronounced so by BL Ochman over five years ago. Yet I detect a slight pulse and here’s the case for resuscitation:
- The discipline of writing the news in one short sentence is invaluable. Even if you don’t use the release, it informs your telephone pitch.
- The process of drafting and approval should force practitioners, clients and bosses to interrogate their motives: is it more than advertising? is it news? is it a national, local, trade or internal only story?
- There are more audiences for public relations than the media. Others still pay more attention to ‘news’ or ‘news release’ (both are preferable to ‘press release’) than, say, ‘memo’.
- Companies with no news (ie no news releases on the web) look moribund. As Intel’s Andy Grove famously put it, ‘there are two types of companies – the quick and the dead’. What’s (not) going on at Vodafone?
PR Studies 
Long live the news release
More gems of genius from Richard Bailey who says Long live the news release!
One of my pet irritations is the number of PR people who persist in
using the term press release. I have never used it. It’s something I
was taught in my first few week…
Updated design
For the benefit of those using an RSS reader, you may like to know that we updated the design of Collective Conversation a little.
The formal corporate announcement – aka the “press release” — is of course a required element of material disclosure and stakeholder communications. According to a recent survey, however, many companies still like to announce bad news on a Friday afternoon thinking they’ll minimize “negative” media coverage. Here are five reasons why doing this actually makes things even worse (with comment from a financial business reporter who says he lives to find bad news in late-afternoon filings).
Thanks, and for alerting me to your blog (link added to the right).