Many PR agencies and press offices make every effort to turn a press release into something like the company’s business card. This starts with the house font and colors, continues with the exact positioning of the logo and ends with the placement of elements such as the address block in the sidebar or at the foot of the document or the integration of the press images as a thumbnail in the Word document or in the PDF. And not only there: The perfectly styled press release should also be reproduced in the e-mail. But does the effort still make sense today?
Again the thing with the bait …
It can not be said often enough, because it is often forgotten: The bait must taste the fish, not the angler! That’s why you shouldn’t put the cart before the horse when it comes to press releases. This is because the editorial team does not decide whether to publish an issue on the basis of a successful and modern design, but primarily on the basis of the content (even if advertisers are occasionally also taken into account, although the story would not actually have borne this).
The reality in the newsroom
Staffing levels have become increasingly thin in recent years, especially in the editorial departments of the trade media (but not only there). On the other hand, the workload has increased, because editors are now generally no longer only responsible for the print edition; they have to feed the online edition in parallel and every day, as well as disseminate the news via social media channels such as LinkedIn. That’s why every editor is happy if he has as little work as possible with the incoming press releases. This starts with the structure of the press distribution list, with PR software such as PressFile, so that the inbox is only filled with what is actually relevant for the publication, and the personal salutation, which signals a minimum of appreciation to the counterpart. Here, too, PR software can provide support.
What is it actually about
This should already be clear from the subject. The great headline is out of place at this point, it is only the content and who the press release comes from that counts. In the e-mail itself, it helps the editor if you tightly summarize all the main statements already in the intro and explain where to find the related materials such as documents, images or graphics. This makes it much easier for the other person to decide whether it is worth reading on.
Text versus design
This short prelude is followed by the actual press release. It is sufficient to copy the text into the mail, including the binder and boilerplate. The only formatting necessary to help with orientation is headlines and subheads set to “bold.” Everything else may and should remain in the default font of the mail client. Pretty banners, boxes, decorative lines in the CI or formatting in the house font belong in a layouted newsletter from marketing, but under no circumstances in a press release. This is because these fonts are often displayed incorrectly to the addressee because his mail client converts them to other fonts available on the computer. And all that newsletter regalia gets in the way of fast information delivery. It also signals the completely wrong message to the journalist: I am advertising!
No attachments: extras are available online
For the editorial department, the described content and structure of a press release is completely sufficient. Because it takes just a few glances to see whether the content is exciting for the magazine or the portal. If it is, it can be processed directly via copy & paste. The associated graphics, images or documents should be offered separately for download. File attachments are prohibited by themselves because of the spam filters that are usually strictly set today. But even direct download links to Office documents are often already classified as suspicious for spam and prevent delivery to the addressee. It is therefore ideal to offer all this material collected in a newsroom, such as that of the PR software PressFile: This way, the editorial team can find all the ingredients in one place and can decide for themselves what they want to download and what not.
Here the layout has its place
In spite of everything, there is nothing to be said against neatly laying out a press release in Word and providing it with everything that the CI requires. This is because it helps enormously in the internal approval process if all those involved can find each other not only in terms of content, but also visually. This press release can then also be made available as a Word file in the newsroom. There, anyone can download and watch it, if they want to (but de facto this happens rather rarely). And it is quite sufficient to provide this as a Word document, Converting it to a PDF, on the other hand, is superfluous. While a Word document can be easily processed, the transfer of text from PDF repeatedly leads to problems, for example because word wrapping does not work or umlauts and special characters are destroyed. You can save yourself the trouble.
