Further calls for the death of the press release
Frequently now I receive apologetic emails from PR reps, little personal notes sheepishly asking me if they can send me a press release. They recognize the disdain that many bloggers have toward the medium, and so they figure that if they ask nicely first, addressing me by name, then I will temporarily put down my guard and let them shovel processed, watered-down text into my inbox.
I’ve been put in situations before when working on clients where someone placed a press release in front of me to accompany my pitches. I’ve never included them. As I wrote in a recent PBS piece about how PR people should approach bloggers, the blogosphere is very unresponsive to this approach and it isn’t atypical for the press releases to go to the spam folder.
Today, TechCrunch — known for its rants against the PR industry — takes a dig at the press release, naming the 10 words that should never be included in them.
I’d like to tackle a different problem in this post, one that reporters from around the world and whatever field they cover will no doubt recognize. The issue I have with press releases, and the reason I think they are a thing from a distant past in its current form, is that they basically all look alike. Sure, the companies that are talked about can be different, and the type of news coming from them can be different, but the copy, form and style are often so much alike that for large parts of the announcements you could just as easily swap the names of the companies and keep the rest of the words. Oftentimes, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
To “spruce up” the press release, some PR people have introduced something called a “virtual press release,” which is a multi-media package. But it’s still a press release, still anchored down by the impersonal bland language that has plagued the industry for years.
