Press release tips

As someone who receives a lot of press releases for my job - and writes them occasionally, too - I have some tips to make sure your release (or memo or story or whatever) actually gets read and used. And not as the butt of an office joke or an example of what not to do.

• Send it electronically. We're not going to retype your release. We're going to cut and paste. We're lazy. Help us help you. If you send it as a PDF, send some sort of text file as well to facilitate this.
  
• Spelling counts. Use spellcheck, but also actually read it for homophones. If you can't be bothered to spellcheck, why would I think that you bothered to factcheck?
  
• Grammar counts. Know when to use a comma and when to use a semicolon. Know where punctuation goes in regards to quotation marks. Check your work for frequently confused words. Avoid the excessive use of exclamation points! Really! Unless you want to sound like a teenage girl!!!
  
• Include a descriptive title, but don't make it so long that it becomes a full, run-on sentence. Feel free to add a subtitle, but don't feel bad when it gets ignored. If it's not headline-worthy, we pretty much don't care.
  
• Include any photos as attachments, not embedded in the body of the release. We can't magically make those low-quality photos into print-quality photos. And even if we could, we wouldn't, because it annoys us.
  
• Corollary to the above: if you provide a photo, provide a cutline. We're not psychic, and the odds are we don't care enough to call you to find out who that guy is in the photo. We'd rather just leave it out. And we will.
• Put all the important info in the first paragraph of the release. If you can't summarize it, we probably won't bother to.
• People say things; they rarely state things. Using "stated" instead of "said" with your quotes just makes you (and whoever you're quoting) sound incredibly pretentious. Unless that's the effect you're going for, use "said."
• Don't use fancy fonts or colors or graphics. You're writing a press release, not an ad for a circus. Keep it professional. (Unless it is an ad for a circus - then go for it!)
• Proofread. Then have someone else proofread it. This may seem obvious, but you really do want to keep your mistakes to a minimum. Proofreading can help accomplish this. Really. Trust me on this one.

I'm sure I could come up with a whole bunch of other things, but then they start devolving into pet peeves - and, OK, I admit the "said/stated" thing falls into that category - and every one has different ones. These are the basics. Use them. Get better responses to your releases.

Go now and proofread.

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