Tuesday, July 22, 2014 even newspaper editors are ditching the press release
If there's one thing that guarantees debate it's the future of the press release question. Thing is, while PR people are talking newspaper people have started to quietly turn away from it.
I missed the apparently now annual @commscamp dust up over the Press Release this year.
I may have inadvertently started it and run away last year, and I think I was supposed to kick off a brawl about it at an LGComms fringe event last year too, but sort of declined. Sort of.
But there it was, in all its #commscamp14 glory. The 'new guard/old guard' row. Like Labour in the 80s; a bit of insular, self-serving policy debate as the rest of the world looks away, faintly embarrassed, shuffles along and gets on with modern life.
"The press release is dead, because... social media"
"No it ain't, because... what I do."
I have sometimes expressed a belief that newspapers are probably finished, but don't think I have ever made an argument that traditional media brands are dead. Far from it. I think more people carry more news brands and look to more sources and individual articles, images and writers than ever before. It's easier to pick the little bits you want on a phone than to wearily wade through the whole local rag, a daily, good-for-you-and-now-without-extra-hacking national, and 'the Sunday that lasts a month' every week.
We'll soon reach a point where even TV and radio news broadcasts are available as story by story nuggets online, rather than as a whole show (yes, I mean *you*, the BBC).
Thing is - in terms of the Press Release debate - that we may have forgotten, not for the first time, to ask *cough*... the customer.
I've been in a new job for just a few weeks, and the editor of the local news brand (plural actually; he manages what I think a journalist would feel obliged to call a 'stable of titles') was good enough to meet me. He asked me not to be precise about his physical, hard copy circulation figures, so I won't, but they were a bit lower than I would have guessed and I'm the prophet of doom when it comes to newsprint.
However - and this is massively important - his daily readership figure is the highest it has been for a hundred years.
Check that.
The highest readership figure that that local news brand has had for a century.
With your twitter, and your telly, and your crystal set (digital with a global reach, natch), and your rolling, twenty-four-hours-whether-you-like-it-or-not news channels, he has more pairs of eyes on his content
than for a hundred bloody years.
Wow.
Why? How is he doing that?
Because - drumroll - his readers are online. And he is segmenting his audience, understanding that some parts of his readership have no interest in brand a, but will read brand b and c. And he's driving an integrated digital content strategy, through twitter, and Facebook and Instagram and apps, and driving people back to the brand's (plural) online services.
I think he's doing what we should be doing. Building trust, moving away from one-size-fits-all, understanding audiences and their preferences and delivering high-quality digital content to his customers, to inform and engage. He doesn't believe for a moment that the paper is the only channel he should create content for. Not for a minute.
He's a dangerous radical. ;0)
And when I asked him for his view of us (I meant the council, but he took it I meant the comms team) his answer was short and telling; "Frankly, it feels like we've left you behind".
He doesn't really want press releases. He wants us to publish video, audio, digital images, interviews, information... digital content designed to build trust, to move away from the one-size-fits-all, and to inform and engage our customers. He wants to be able to use our content; says he WILL use our content; and that means it reaching the same audiences we want to reach (as part of our full understanding of ALL the channels we have to hand). I suspect that means we need to find a way to manage a broad partnership and a critical friendship, with a changed outlook and a new set of behaviours.
So why do some insist that the Press Release is still key tool number one? (Worse there may be some who think it the only tool worth picking up). I'm not sure. I suppose 'we've always done it that way'.
But increasingly, it seems, the industry we think it helps sees it as a sign that we have been left behind.
Eddie Coates-Madden is head of communications at Sheffield City Council.
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Picture credit.
Reader Comments (5)
Hi
I work in PR and I'm following this press release debate with interest. It'd be great to see some examples of alternatives to the press release that have effectively secured content. We use social media a lot but do need to get better at using videos and sound-bytes. Does anyone use the social media press release that's been talked about? How are people capturing everything they need to tell people on Twitter, for example, without linking back to a story on the website?
Thanks
Katy
Loving this debate - and would like to ask a question to all.
How much responsibility should the media outlets take themselves in creating the content from the stories provided (however they are provided to them)
It wasn't that long ago that some press would insist on only using their own photographer and refuse to use supplied pics.
So if papers feel they need to diversify in how they publish and present their content, then should't it be the outlets themeselves who are creating their own video, infographics, audiocasts, vlogs, Twitter Q&A's, CONTENT out of stories provided.
Some do - Express & Star )Midlands) for example do have a journo who is curating a nice youtube channel, and making theire own simple videos based on stories in the print version - and the nationals have entire teams being developed to create this content
So who is it that has the expectation that it is we who should be supplying that material alreaay produced, filmed, photographed, edited, recorded - ie on a silver platter
So - question is - where does the responsibility lie to actually create this stuff ?
Maybe all the press photographers that have been laid off in the regions can help us create some of that content now that they have time on their hands???
Very good point Russel. It seems that people working in PR/Comms have to work harder and harder to attract the attention of journalists by creating more exciting content that keeps up with the digital era. Yes, we should all be aiming to do this anyway as it improves communication for tenants but with all the cuts to local journalism (which I think is incredible sad), I think there's more pressure on comms teams because of less and less resources at the media outlets. Having said that, I remember a discussion with fellow PR colleagues around just 12 months ago about how journalists might be more welcome to receiving well-written press releases because they unfortunately don't have much time to get out to things anymore. It's definitely an interesting debate and I'm keen to know what other people think too. Maybe we should invite some editors/reports to comment and help us out.
We're also looking at how we deliver news differently - whether that be a wordpress site with shareable content or just sharpening up the current way. I also struggle with the balance of what we need to create for media and what media should create from our content, and, if we go with the latter, the issues of controlling the message that we'll all have to contend with higher up the organisation. A good starting point is us being ready to facilitate the digital opportunities - making sure we have a spokesperson to film/record who is briefed and available at very short notice (not always easy).
Problem is that not all newspapers are at the same stage, and the ones that are far ahead tend to be that way because they've got themselves a tech savvy reporter who's keen to do things differently. It's having that balance between creating content that ALL media find useful, regardless of where they are in terms of digital work themselves.
As a PR officer, the press release is the basis of what we do because it works! It can be adapted for the web, social media, different formats. You can re-name is as a news release or story on your website. But a clear piece on a story, with quotes is increasingly important to hard-pressed (sorry about the pun) journos, whatever field they work in.. .
Sure it isn't the only means of communication but it is an ideal way to get a story down - You can then change it for whatever media you want...
I had media enquiries from almost every kind of media going today, based on releases I sent out, put on our website as news stories and sent out through social media.
I can't see this changing.