The “press release is dead” meme just won’t go away. Every time you turn around, somebody is proclaiming that blogs will replace press releases.
Press releases are written in stilted, corporate jargon, the argument goes, and blogs use natural, authentic, human voices. Who would want to read a press release when they could read a blog?
It came up again yesterday as I caught up on some podcasts and listened to Amy Gahran disparage the press release in a panel sponsored by Business Wire. (Press release distribution services such as BW will continue to thrive, she noted; it’s the form of the press release that will die.)
With all the optimism that blogs can do the press releases’ job, I thought it would be instructive-just for my own edification-to pull one of the more venerated public relations textbooks from my shelf, “The Practice of Public Relations” by Fraser Seitel.
I was struck instantly by the fact that Seitel doesn’t refer to these tools as “press releases,” but rather as “news releases.” Here’s what Seitel writes:
There is no better, clearer, more persuasive way to announce news about an organization, its products, and their applications than by issuing a news release. A news release may be written as the document of record to state an organization’s official position-for example, in a court case or in announcing a price or rate increase. More frequently, however, releases have one overriding purpose: to influence a publication to write favorably about the material discussed.
Got that, everyone? The release is targeted at the media, not at everyone else. You could issue the release in order to get ink and post to a blog as an alternate channel. While Seitel notes that many newspaper editors swear by the press release, he concedes others call them worthless drivel. Is that the fault of the tool itself or its format, or of the people who write them? According to researcher Linda Morton, from the Herbert School of Journalism at the University of Oklahoma, there are three reasons press releases get a bad rap:
- They are poorly written.
- They are rarely localized.
- They are not newsworthy.
Listening to Amy stomp on the press release, it occurred to me that her argument was simple: Bad press releases are bad. But are good press releases also bad, now that blogs have arrived? Can a blog really do the work of a press release?
In many instances, yes. But not in all instances. This notion brings us back to the truism that new media do not kill old media: Old media adapt. With the exception of the telegraph, I can’t think of a medium in the last 150 years or so that vanished due to the introduction of a new medium. Remember when IT showed up in your office around 1993 or 94 to get email working? Did they rip out your fax machines, insisting that email can better handle the fax machine’s work? I bet you still get faxes.
A case study
The obvious continued use of the press release is satisfying disclosure requirements. A blog cannot ensure material information is disclosed concurrently to all markets. Release your earnings statement in a blog and somebody’s going to go to jail. Another obvious use: A lot of small publications publish press releases verbatim, notably trade publications. Some pundits are already hammering the nails into the coffin of the trade publication, but can you honestly tell me that people in the toy industry have stopped reading “Toy World?” Gimme a break. A press release placed in a trade publication can still produce highly useful results. The format of the press release-the inverted pyramid news story-makes it easy for the editor of a small publication with limited resources to add the story with a minimum of work.
But there are other, more subtle uses for a well-crafted news release that simply couldn’t be assumed by a blog. Here’s an example.
Back around 1990 or 1991, when I was director of corporate communications at Allergan (an ophthalmic pharmaceutical company based in Irvine, California), I got a call from a television news reporter with a local station in Waco, Texas, where the company maintained a manufacturing plant. “We have a report that the sheriff has arrested a man for selling contact lenses to children on street corners,” he told me. “Since you have a plant in town, we’d like to know if they’re your lenses.”
It took a minute or two to get over the very idea that someone was selling contact lenses-not heroin or crack cocaine-to kids on street corners. It turns out that the prom was approaching, and girls were anxious to get tinted lenses so their eyes would omatch their gowns. I needed to make some calls to learn whose lenses were being peddled, but I had a chore that was more urgent than answering the reporter’s question. Wearing a lens that was not prescribed by a doctor could cause permanent eye damage. We had to get the word out.
Of course, there were no blogs in the early 1990s, but it would have been an ineffective tool even if there had been such a tool. A single news release distributed to all Waco media and schools created near-instant awareness in the community. The warning to make sure your child wasn’t wearing an ill-gotten lens was all over the local news that night, and teachers throughout the city issued warnings to their students about the risks they faced if they stuck those puppies in their eyes. God knows how many corneal injuries we headed off by getting the word out fast. I seriously doubt that a blog could have achieved that same result.
(By the way, they weren’t our lenses. They’d been stolen off a Chiron truck out of Chicago.)
Hammers and nails
The success of our media outreach via news release was based on a strategy. When thinking strategically, PR professionals identify the goal, set a strategy, list measurable objectives and then-last-select the appropriate tools. In this case, the tool was a press release, and would have been a press release even if blogs had been an option. The advocates of burying the press release don’t think strategically. They think tactically. They start with the tool. “Whatever the issue, use a blog!” They are so enamored of blogs they believe it can solve every problem, address every issue. It’s the old analogy come to life: When you sell hammers, every problem looks like a nail.
Looking back at Fraser Seitel’s review of press releases, it’s easy to see when-strategically-they can be valuable. For example, it’s tough to localize a blog post, but effective press releases can be localized for the media outlets to which they are delivered.
Yes, in a lot of instances, blogs can be used in place of press releases. In fact, anyone who reads this blog knows I’m an active advocate of blogging. But I’m also a realist, and I’m practical, to boot. To throw out an entire tool without thinking about how it can be adapted in light of blogs’ availability is just plain stupid. Each tool should be evaluated based on its strengths and applied based on the outcomes it can achieve.
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.
