Prompt's TechBlog

During my twelve years as a tech journalist I must have seen somewhere in the region of half a billion press releases. Every morning another tribe of pygmies would face extinction, as the technology marketing industry pulped several thousand acres of Amazonian rainforest in order to produce the daily mountain of press releases it dumped on my desk. My email inbox was so heavily clogged with news releases that finding a piece of spam became a rare and exciting treat.

Over 99% of those press releases got trashed, most of them before I even reached the end of the headline, and I wasn't even a particularly discerning journalist - those with higher standards than me (and that would be most of them) are even harder to impress. If you want your press releases to make it into the 1% that journalists will at least consider reading all the way through, make sure you avoid these mistakes:

1) Boring, long winded headlines
"Universal Fixtures Picks YawnSoft e-Flange NUGGET-Integrator 7.3c to Port Legacy CRP Solution to bPLOD Interface for Improved SCM Performance!"

Congratulations, the journalist won't be writing about your story, because you've just sent him into a coma. Long, dreary headlines which feature lots of arcane acronyms, industry jargon and obscure product names will guarantee your press release gets ditched.

2) Not getting to the point
This may come as a shock to some of you, but journalists do not read press releases for fun. You might think it's a good idea to start the release with a bit of background information, maybe a paragraph or two to introduce the company before you get into the meat of the announcement. Wrong. Your press release is now sat in the recycling bin, waiting to be turned into cheap toilet paper.

3) Flowery prose
There's nothing more tiresome than trying to wade through a press release that's been written by somebody who thinks 'good writing' means being as verbose and bombastic as possible. So you figured out how to use the thesaurus feature in your word processor, good for you!

4) It's a press release, not a sales pitch
If you want to publish an advert, call the advertising-sales desk and have your credit card ready, otherwise you probably shouldn't let your sales team write press releases for you. Press releases exist for the purpose of releasing information to the press (the clue's in the title) and most journalists aren't interested in reading your sales brochure.

5) Don't assume journalists know who you are
Unless you work for Microsoft or Google, it's safe to assume that journalists don't have an encyclopaedic knowledge of your company and its products, so you might want to make sure that your releases include all the relevant information.

You don't need to fill the release with background information, but try to make sure that the copy will make sense to somebody who, heaven forbid, has never heard of your company or products.

6) You are not funny
I have never seen an attempt at humour in a press release that's been even remotely funny, ever. Humour and press releases rarely mix well, only a talented few can pull it off. Weak puns and half baked jokes will turn a standard press release into an abomination that will make journalists want to hunt you down and viciously beat you to within an inch of your life, and they probably won't cover the story either.