A couple of years ago I met a journalist who had been an editor for The Telegraph whilst working in London. He told me that editors and journalists receive thousands of press releases every single day and that those releases would become a huge pile on someone’s desk.  The editor has roughly 10 seconds to decide if that press release is worth reading, so if it looks boring it’s in the bin straight away.

He said that the key with press releases is to try and get the entire story in the headline, sub-head line and first paragraph and make sure it’s easily readable by using clear fonts and 1.5 line spacing. Then put the details, quotes and other information nearer the bottom so journalists can refer to it if they are interested. That way, an editor will know instantly if your story is what he’s looking for or not.

If you don’t do this, then journalists and editors will start to remember that you send out rubbish and subsequently, will bin anything with your company logo on it before they even read the headline which is definitely bad news.  It’s even more relevant now that the majority of journalists prefer to receive press releases by email. If you keep sending them rubbish or attaching large files that fill up their inboxes, they will just delete it or even worse, block you altogether.

This was a great piece of advice that definitely does work.  You’ll find if you adopt these practices, you’ll get a much better response and that equals more column inches.  You can’t win them all and you never really know how a story is going to pan-out for you but if you don’t piss off the journalists then they will respect you for it.

There’s loads more pointers on this subject but I’ll try and cover those in later posts unless anyone else would like to add a few comments?

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