I joined the PR profession by way of engineering to sales support to tech marketing and then sales, until I finally realized that the career aptitude test that I took way back in the beginning – right after I graduated, the one that said "no, dummy you are not an engineer or a sales guy, you are a PR executive" – was actually right, even though I had little idea at the time what a PR exec was or did.
And when I was in the marketing rung of my career, and just starting to flirt with PR, us marketing types used to wink knowingly amongst ourselves when discussing the proper role of the press releases in PR. The good journalists, it was said, viewed press releases as the last resort for a good story. In short, the mere existence of a press release did not equate to a good story, and vice versa – good journalists could sniff out and write stories without the crutch of a press release.
However my experiences in the real world, working first as a freelancer and then at a PR agency for a total for twelve years has not squared with this assumption. It seems that, for all the criticism of press releases – both the quantity and quality of them – the news media is conditioned to expect that anything newsworthy should be accompanied by a press release.
Unfailingly, when we set out to promote any kind of news, a good segment of the target media list asks to see a press release before committing to a briefing. That is why I am convinced that the press release, whether it is a traditional one or of the updated social media release variety, is not going away anytime soon.
And that is why I implore our teams, regardless of what other materials we are using to support the campaigns, to also include press releases. It it just easier than explaining why we don’t have one, and if putting the information in press release format somehow validates its news value, then why not?
