A good Press Release

This past Thursday, I attended a speech at ONU by David Trinko, a local Journalist who spoke about the importance of making pitches and press releases.  That is, doing pitches and press releases correctly.

From a public relations professional’s perspective (excuse the alliteration), if we contact a journalist with a well-crafted press release or are pitching them an idea or something we want them to run, we can’t understand why they don’t do it sometimes.  As Mr. Trinko explained, part of the reason is because they are barraged with emails and phone calls from every other PR professional who thinks the exact same thing. 

According to Trinko, he receives around 300 emails a day.  I can’t even fathom receiving that many emails in one week, let alone one day.  It also must be considered that these emails have to be evaluated and read through to see if there is valuable information that can be used as a story. 

Half the time (and everyone knows this is true) when we receive emails, there are specific ones that we automatically delete.  We know who sent the emails and what emails purposes are, but we don’t care.  Newsletters are a good example of this.  Anyway, imagine reading through and responding to at least 300 different emails a day, and then receiving follow up emails.

This is why PR professionals must make it easier on journalists who are on this incredible time crunch with an incredible amount of work to do.  Having the press release formatted correctly, giving the journalist the important information first, making sure they have all valuable details and making sure they know whom it’s from are a few examples of how to establish a positive relationship with a journalist.