Never Bury The Lead!

In the movie Broadcast News, a producer played by Albert Brooks tries to convince another producer, played by Holly Hunter, not to date a handsome news announcer (William Hurt) that he has no respect for. 

Instead of dating the announcer, who Brooks believes is dim and devious, he wants her to date him.

Following an evening out, he makes his case for why she should date him. He concludes this way:

“I grant you everything. But give me this: he personifies everything that you've been fighting against. And I'm in love with you."

After that, he says deprecatingly: "How do you like that? I buried the lead.”

(See that clip from the movie here.) 

Never bury the lead. The most compelling, most newsworthy aspect of what you are trying to say must always be at the top of your press release. 

The lead is the thing that makes the reporter, editor or news director want to continue reading. It’s got to be a grabber. It has to catch their attention.

And it has to do it in about 30 seconds, the maximum amount of time most people in the media have to give to your e-mail.

This is the opposite of what they teach you in university, where an essay rises to a conclusion. In a press release, the most important information is always at the top. (See my post about the inverted pyramid style of writing.)

My friend Nick Martin, the education reporter for the Winnipeg Free Press, wrote about his experience with a buried lead recently.

On his blog, he wrote about a PR firm in the U.S. that failed to provide a local angle to a story Nick had written about.

Nick managed to write the story, about a Winnipeg company named Permission Click, but with no help from the PR firm. It was only after the owner of the local business called Nick that he managed to connect the dots.

“I reread the email pitch that had set all this off, and nowhere in it was there any mention or hint that Permission Click was local," he writes. 

"And I dug down into my deleted files, and there found a previous email from the PR people in Florida, a lengthy story pitch which, at the very bottom, mentioned that Permission Click is based in Winnipeg."

Since Nick gets 70-90 e-mails a day, it's hard to give each one the time or attention it deserves.

That's why the most important information needs to be right at the top.

As Nick wrote about his experience with Permission Click and the PR firm:

“If your client is local — and yes, we are parochial within a readership area larger than several states put together — then you should say so. Like, in the lead.”

His advice to the PR firm: “First paragraph: ‘Local Winnipeg tech startup Permission Click could have prevented the alleged theft of $24,000 in school lunch money.'

‘CEO Chris Johnson is available to talk to you about the way in which his company has already helped 12 Winnipeg schools communicate far more efficiently and easily with parents, and he can tell you about dozens of schools in Manitoba who are doing due diligence on his company and could soon be signing up.'"

Because that information wasn’t easily found, the story almost didn’t get written.

The takeaway for non-profits? When writing a press release, or proclaiming love, never bury the lead.

What is News?

A reporter I know once wrote that he was thinking of putting a sign on his desk that said: “Caution—press release crossing.”

He went on to say that “herds of road kill masquerading as news releases cross my desk every day,” but that only a few catch his attention, making him stop and take a second look.

His experience is not unique. The mainstream media get hundreds of press releases each day. A news editor I know gets over 300 e-mails a day, just by herself.

In this blizzard of press releases, how do you make sure yours gets noticed?

For me, it all boils down to one simple thing: Send news. But was is news?

  

One definition of news is the old Dog-Man Principle, which goes like this: 

“When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.”

In other words, news is something unusual, something that doesn’t happen all the time or every day. It’s not routine, run-of-the-mill, common-place.

Or, as Kirk Lapointe, former editor of the Vancouver Sun put it:

“Planes take off and land every day. We only cover the ones that crash.”

The definition of news I like is this:

Does it tell my readers, viewers, listeners something they don’t know about something they care about?

This is the kind of question an editor asks when he or she receives a press release. Let’s take a closer look at it.

Does it tell my readers, viewers or listeners.

For a press release to attract attention, it must have a local angle—something that connects the story to the people served by the media outlet.

Does it tell my readers something they don’t know.

The press release must contain new information—something that people don’t know. Otherwise, why report about it? What is the new thing you want to share with them?

Does it tell my readers something they don’t know about something they care about.

The first question an editor asks when getting a press release is: Who cares?

Of course, you care about it. So does your organization, the volunteers or the beneficiaries. But why should anyone else care?

And why should the editor or news director who gets your press release? They are the first ones you have to convince to care.

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Giving the media something their readers, viewers or listeners don’t know about something they care about is the first step in keeping your press release from becoming road kill.

In future posts, I’ll look a closer at various aspects of news, such as the local angle, human angle, impact, prominence, controversy, timeliness and hard versus soft news.  

How to Keep Your Press Releases Out of the Spam Folder

A few years ago, Winnipeg Free Press humour columnist Doug Speirs became fed up with the barrage of pointless press releases that daily fill his inbox.

In a column titled “Could you make those news releases any less funny?”, Doug noted that “almost every day, as regular as clockwork, news releases about incredibly obscure things in incredibly obscure places are emailed to my computer by public relations companies I've never heard of.”

Why do they send this stuff to him?

“Simple,” he stated. “I'm on the top-secret, computerized list of select journalists, a group whose membership is strictly limited to people who are currently alive.”

Normally, he deletes these e-mails without reading them. “But not today. Today, I'm all over them.”

What followed was a funny column about how Doug called these companies to see why they thought Winnipeggers should be interested in their products. You can read his column here.  

Of course, these businesses didn’t actually send Doug those press releases; they hired PR companies to do it for them.

If you are doing communications for non-profit organizations, you know about these PR companies.

Not a month goes by that I don't get a couple of e-mails from them saying they can help me reach thousands of journalists.

It's true;they can reach that many journalists. The only problem is that most of them have no interest in my press releases.

I have first-hand experience this as the freelance Faith Page columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press. 

Like Doug, my name is also on that secret list of writers who are alive.

I don’t get as many junk press releases as he does, but the ones that come my way get the same treatment: I promptly delete them.

But getting your press release deleted, or just being made fun of, is better than what happened to over 300 people who sent junk press releases to Chris Anderson of Wired magazine in 2007.

In a post titled “Sorry PR People, You're Blocked,” Anderson said “I’ve had it. I get more than 300 emails a day and my problem isn't spam, it's PR people.”

“Lazy flacks send press releases to the Editor in Chief of Wired because they can't be bothered to find out who on my staff, if anyone, might actually be interested in what they're pitching.”

He posted this warning: “I only want two kinds of email: those from people I know, and those from people who have taken the time to find out what I'm interested in and composed a note meant to appeal to that. Everything else gets banned on first abuse.”

Not only that; Anderson posted the e-mail addresses of all offending people, organizations and PR firms who had sent him misdirected press releases in the previous 30 days.

“If their address gets harvested by spammers by being published here, so be it—turnabout is fair play,” he stated.

What followed was a list of over 300 e-mail addresses. 

When it comes to media relations, nothing turns off a reporter more than getting junk from people who should know better. 

If it’s worth my time to read, then it’s worth your time to find out what I write about.

It's a good media relations strategy, and a simple courtesy. It might even help you make the news. 

The Inverted Pyramid, or Why Everything You Learned About Writing in University is Wrong

When I speak to university students who want to learn to do media relations, the first thing I tell them is: Everything you learned in university about writing you need to forget.

Anyone who has learned to write essays in university knows what I am talking about.

For a university essay, you are supposed to start by stating your thesis, go on to describe your methodology, detail the different options, and then add in supporting material.

Finally, you come to the big reveal—the conclusion.

That may get you a passing grade in university, but in the world of media relations there is only one word for it: Failure.

When writing a press release to catch the attention of the media, you have to do the opposite of what you learned in university.

You need to start with the most important information (the conclusion), then add the rest of the material as filler.

This style of writing is known as the inverted pyramid style. The most important information is at the top, the less important information is at the bottom.

Some say this style of writing originated with the telegraph. In its earliest days, the telegraph was not always reliable; the transmission could cut out before the reporter got to the end of his report.

The inverted pyramid style ensured that the most important info was always transmitted.

And what is the most important information? 

Who is involved, what it is about, when and where it happens and—importantly—why the reporter should care. (The five Ws of news.)

For busy reporters (and they are all busy), the inverted pyramid style helps them quickly decide if the press release is worth reading, and keeping.

The fact of the matter is that most reporters will only read the header, sub-head and opening paragraph or two of most press releases—about 30 seconds worth of time, or as much information might fit into a standard e-mail reading pane.

If you haven’t grabbed them by then, too bad. 

So make sure your conclusion—the news in the news release—isn’t buried at the bottom.

That may get you an A from a professor, but a failing grade from the media.