Scott Baradell cites an Economist article in which Bruce Lowry of Novell foresees blogs “completely replacing press releases within 10 years.” The argument goes like this: The Net has promoted transparency.
Your press releases don’t just go to a targeted segment of the press; they also get posted to Yahoo! and other sites. Since everybody sees all releases, companies need to be more consistent in their messages. So as long as companies are saying the same thing to everybody, why not just move from press releases to blogs?
Even if the premise were accurate, the idea is still absurd. The primary difference between a blog and a press release is that you can push the release to a list of people who should see it.
You certainly can’t count on every editor and reporter in a given market or covering a certain beat to subscribe to your feed or routinely check your blog. Of course, some reporters are insisting that PR people distribute releases and pitches via RSS, and we all learned in PR 101 that you must accommodate the reporter’s contact preferences.
Then there’s the use of press releaes to satisfy regulatory requirements such as communating substantive financial information consistently and concurrently to financial audiences.
But the issue goes deeper than that.
I remember a couple years ago having the same discussion twice in a matter of weeks. The first time, I was having dinner with a group of PR agency reps who handled a major high-tech account. Knowing that press releases about this company would be posted to consumer news and business sites, the agency was elevating the language and technical lingo in the releases beyond the level at which the average reporter could understand it.
“Our typical reader is an engineer, and our releases have to meet their needs,” I was told.
A couple days later, I was talking with a communicator who worked for a large telecommunications company. He articulated the same issue, except in his case the average reader was Joe or Jill Beercan. “We dumb down our press releases so a customer living in a trailer park can understand them,” he said.
I was appallled at both approaches. After all, there’s a reason they’re called press releases and the fact that they are made available to the general public doesn’t change the release’s main target. Every press release I ever wrote was designed to get a reporter to use it as the basis or inspiration for a story he’d write himself. I always envisioned a lazy editor whenever I saw one of my releases reproduced wholesale in a newspaper.
The idea that an organization shouldn’t target the right message to the right audience is ridiculous, even if any given release will show up online. The financial community looks for a different angle than the trade press.
Over at the Verizon media Web site, journalists can narrow down the releases they want to receive from the company so they see only content that is relevant to their interests. A reporter who writes the “Who’s News” column for the Atlanta Constitution’s business section could specify that she wants only releases dealing with executive staffing in Georgia. Press releases that match those criteria will be the only ones she gets.
Currently, she’d get them by e-mail. RSS would be great. But could you target like that with a blog?
What to do, then, about the notion that everybody can read every press release? Should the agency working with the high-tech company produce releases a reporter can’t understand? Should the telecommuncations company write press releases at the third-grade level?
Press releases should be written for the press. The fact that they appear elsehwere is incidental. How much trouble would it be to add something like this to the press release boilerplate: “This release was written for the press. A consumer news release on this topic is available at…”
None of which suggests that company executives shouldn’t blog. Opening a channel of communcation between an organization’s leadership and key external audiences is one of the best business uses of blogs. But it doesn’t eliminate the need for press releases any more than the introduction of e-mail eliminated the need for telephones and faxes.
Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.
As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.
