Socialized Press Releases for the Information Age

11:30 AM Jul 11, 2006

Lots of catching up to do from my fortnight's blessed disconnectedness, but let's start with something I'd hoped to get to even before I left.

Press releases.

Those queer, stilted, familiars of the public relations guild's black arts, dispatched in their hundreds to broadcasters and scribes in a mad scrabble (or faint prayer) for the opportunity to issue the rebuttal quote or pitch a feature story.

Here's a recent one from my former shop, offered because it's a fine and typical example that I happen to know is written by a pro. The press release proceeds as a sort of elaborate mating ritual, contact information first, lede out front, a few factual nuggets and a couple of ready-to-lift canned quotes, entombed in the weird form of a compact quasi-news story whose content journos will hack away in seizing the marrow.

Strange to say that in a decade-plus of the Internet's incursions into the readership of old media -- and the sure (if halting) adoption of online research, communication and cross-purposing by said old media -- the press release remains very much what it was in the day of Ivy Lee, conceding little in format to the world wide web save search optimization.

P.R. shop SHIFT Communications has a notion to reinvent the medium with the "social media press release."

Their May release of a template (.pdf) for press communications responding to the ways both old and new media process information. It's generated plenty of comment, mostly by more business-oriented observers (see the chatter at the purpose-built del.icio.us page).

But it should be of interest to nonprofits as well, and perhaps especially so. If you're already blogging, monitoring the web for coverage, collecting statistics, research and background ... this format likely responds much more readily to your existing workflow and the information readily at your fingertips, without requiring you to churn out original prose that journalists will be trying to read past anyway and in some cases without requiring as much torturous back-and-forth within the organization on the exact wording of the message. And for outreach to bloggers, and to many traditional media as well, it's likely to pack a lot more usable information and perhaps present as a less suspiciously tendentious viewpoint. (All this may be less true for groups whose "press releases" are written more for the consumption of their general supporter base and primarily distributed to that audience, and for whom the story format remains crucial -- although there are still usable lessons here.)

It's a new model, and perhaps a transitional model, in an evolving space. And SHIFT itself will agree (especially since they'd like you as a client) that a release format doesn't address itself to issues like message-framing and distribution that are central to media work. None of it's down from the hand of god, which is the whole point. Even as food for thought, it's a nutritious meal. Others are approaching the challenge in their own ways: the established PR Web incorporating tagging; the brand-new TheWeblogWire offering newswire-like paid distribution to bloggers.

And as entities standing apart from businesses, the nonprofit community may be in a position to contribute interesting evolutions of the form connecting community commentary to a media often thirsty for genuine vox populi. How about links to a listserv archive or the personal blog of someone who cares about your issue but isn't employed by, and may not always toe the line of, your organization? How about a release actually issued by such a community, in which the nonprofit plays the part of consensus-builder, connector and go-between, but not The Expert Commentator?

If media work is in your portfolio, join the 7,500 downloaders, and spark an idea or three.

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