As you have gathered from my previous posts and the other pages on this website, I am a pretty active student journalist. This year, I took on the role of News Editor for GVSU’s student newspaper, the Lanthorn. While the job is rewarding, fun and great on a resume, it’s definitely a lot to keep up with. Every week I am responsible for generating 10-12 story ideas, then helping my team write the stories, edit and post them online. It’s a job with a lot of moving parts that is at times hard to manage. But the most unmanageable part? My inbox. Believe me, I need all the story ideas I can get, but my email is flooded every day with hundreds of press releases I don’t care about and probably won’t read. Sometimes I wake up at 8 am with 10 email notifications, and sometimes I get woken up to them in the middle of the night. It’s not unusual for me to spend 45 minutes paging through my inbox as I search for a story that matters at GVSU. Studying PR has me thinking differently about this issue than I would have before taking CAP 220. What is it about a press release that actually catches my interest? How did the Lanthorn news email even end up on these mailing lists? As an editor for a student newspaper, I am primarily interested in local news and news that is of interest to college students- sometimes that means on campus, sometimes its news about Grand Rapids and every once in a while it’s about something in the state of Michigan that I can localize. As with any news story or blog post, a press release has to grab my attention and provide the information I need right away. This typically starts in the subject line before the email is even open on my screen, but maybe there is also an eye-catching graphic or statistic, or I have had luck getting in touch with the organization in the past. Ultimately, I as a journalist look for something that is marketable. Studying both journalism and PR has taught me that the purpose of a press release is to serve the organization it is about. When I see a press release, I am more concerned with the part of the story I am not being told, and if that is worth reporting on. A 2018 survey of 500 journalists showed that 53% of US-based journalists don’t rely on press releases at all, and only 3% worldwide said they relied on them heavily. As a journalist, this makes sense to me, and as a PR practitioner, this makes me wonder about alternatives to the press release. It’s an interesting turning point in PR, as Ivy Lee’s press release in 1905 is said to be the ‘starting point of modern public relations.’The internet and social media have made it so easy to create discourse and gather a multitude of perspectives in the comments section of any post, but a press release is so one sided. When we share news online, we are interested in stories that will engage readers and lead them to read more on our website.
The same approach is being adopted by PR practitioners. Sharing information that would traditionally be included in a press release can be presented in a blog post, on social media or as a pitch emailed directly to a reporter who would be interested. These alternatives meet journalists where they are and are more likely to find those who are interested in a specific topic. As a PR professional, journalist or day-to-day smartphone owner, consider where you encounter the most news and information you trust; these are the places we need to place our content.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |