by Ernie Smith, the editor of
Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. In another life, he ran
ShortFormBlog.
The
field of public relations is still built on a single foundational
tool—the press release. Why do we still use them? Well, for the
companies, they work.
Press releases are like chum for the
enterprising marketer. For decades, these blurbs have been designed to
draw in journalists looking for the next story,
something to
fill the page or make hay for their audiences. Sometimes, they’re
successful—such as Nintendo of America’s cheeky press release last year
that pointed out their VP of sales has the last name Bowser.
But a lot of the time, they’re full of irrelevant crap. If you mixed a
little bit of chum with a lot of packing peanuts, that’s kind of how
they work for journalists. Today, we’re gonna talk about press releases,
why they exist, and why they annoy journalists so much.
The New York Times published the first press release word-for-word
Last year, Amtrak dealt with a deadly passenger train crash by sending out an email to its customers.
“On
behalf of the entire Amtrak family, I offer our sincere sympathies and
prayers for them and their loved ones. Amtrak takes full
responsibility and deeply apologizes for our role in this tragic
event,”
Amtrak President and CEO Joe Boardman wrote.
The
message contained details about how the company was working to solve
the problems raised by the crash, as well as how it was working to help
the victims. (One of whom, by the way, is a friend of my wife’s,
Seyward Darby. She wrote some powerful words about the crash
over this way. You should read them.)
If
you dig back in the history books, you’ll find that this Amtrak crash
was far from the only passenger train disaster on the books. In fact,
one such crash—with a far higher casualty toll—took place about 60
miles away from the site of the Amtrak 188 crash. Public comments from
the train operators also followed that crash.
“The Pennsylvania Railroad Company is leaving nothing undone to get at the cause of the accident,” the company stated.
Those public comments, from the 1906 Atlantic City train wreck, came from the first-ever press release.
It was published in The New York Times, verbatim—something that would never happen today.
The first press release, borne from a guy with a tainted reputation
That release was masterminded by a guy named Ivy Ledbetter Lee, who’s seen as the father of modern public relations by some.
Much
like many journalists today, Lee came to PR from newspapers, quitting
his press gigs because the pay sucked. Also like many journalists who
switched sides, Lee was seen with suspicion by the industry he left
behind.
The
Times,
for example, may have printed the first press release, but it wasn’t
long before the public relations tool fell outside its “fit to print”
slogan in its unadulterated form. (Journalists were quick to arch their
brows at questionable information, even during the era of Yellow
Journalism.)
Lee, however, was quick to defend his PR firm’s approach, writing a response, the
Declaration of Principles, that emphasized the news value of the information being presented.
“In
brief, our plan is frankly, and openly, on behalf of business concerns
and public institutions, to supply the press and public of the United
States prompt and accurate information concerning subjects which it is
of value and interest to the public to know about,”
Lee explained.
Lee’s
strategy was pretty solid, and he also played key roles in creating
the kind of modern public relations strategies still used today. Some
of his clients were even worse than the ones Aaron Eckhart had to deal
with during
Thank You for Smoking. In the years before his death,
he was tied to Nazi Germany due to one of his public relations campaigns,
leading to a Congressional investigation.
He also was associated with an effort to soften U.S. ties with the Soviet Union during the 1920s.
On
the other hand, argues Northern Kentucky University professor Michael
Turney, he didn’t actually know how awful either of these political
forces were at the time—and that history has judged him unkindly,
especially since he died before either did anything truly below
reproach.
“In this context, was Ivy Lee a good guy or a bad guy?
Perhaps was he just a hard-working public relations professional who
suffered from bad timing and/or made a few bad choices of clients,” he
wrote.
Maybe it’s a great irony of history that such an important PR flack needs a public relations campaign himself.
Press releases have multiplied
An average of 1759 press releases were sent out daily by the three largest press release services in 2013,
according to an estimate by Ragan’s PR Daily contributor Lou Hoffman from
August 2014—altogether more than 600,000 that year. More press releases
than ever are being sent out to fewer journalists than ever, Hoffman
argues.
How PR flacks built their own versions of the Associated Press
These days, if
a company wants to get a message to the press or the public, they may
as well tweet it. The shorter the message, the better—it’s a great way
to control the conversation.
But before the age of social media,
things were a bit more complicated, and at one point, news outlets had
to send their press releases via the mail, which was woefully
inefficient. Fortunately, a few smart folks thought of ways to get
around that problem.
In
1952, the company PR Newswire began working diligently to throw a
bunch of teleprinter machines into newsrooms around the country. The
company worked with PR agencies to basically publish press releases
verbatim on the wires.
Other companies followed suit—Business Wire
put teletype machines inside of newsrooms for free, then charged their
PR clients for the access to the machines.
“When I began, my one employee and I shared a 9-foot-by-12-foot room,”
Business Wire founder Larry Lokey told Stanford University.
“We had one phone, an electric typewriter and a clattering Teletype
connected via leased line to every Bay Area daily newspaper. Each of
them had a Teletype I’d installed there.”
(The company grew big
time from there, and is now owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire
Hathaway. The 89-year-old Lokey, meanwhile, is giving
away his wealth, much of it earned from the Berkshire Hathaway sale, at a breakneck pace.)
From
that teletype-driven history, the services kept innovating, and are
now arguably more influential than ever—they don’t have to pay for ink,
paper, or phone lines, but they have email instead. And goddamn, do
they send a lot of emails.
The companies aren’t afraid of trying new things, either. In 2001, PR Newswire
threw out a multimedia display for the Michael Bay movie
Pearl Harbor—the first multimedia press release of its kind.
Considering that
Pearl Harbor is something of the ultimate display of bombastic commercial film, perhaps it makes sense.
Press releases in the internet age
“I receive more than 500 emails a day. An astonishing
number of them are pitching topics that neither I nor my staff has ever
covered—sent by people who’ve either never read our publication, or
never read our coverage, or noticed what bylines go with what stories.”
— Los Angeles Times reporter Charles Fleming, offering up a common complaint from
journalists who find themselves deluged by press releases on a daily
basis. Some reporters who discussed press releases with
Forbes reporter Robert Wynne say they occasionally get good stuff from press releases, but
TechCrunch reporter
John Biggs is not one of those people. “They offer no context, no
understanding of the receiver, and no story. They are literally the
laziest thing a company can do,” Biggs said.
Press releases exist because, ultimately, they work. For
companies and marketers, they represent a simple way to expose
information that isn’t necessarily newsworthy on its own, but the
definition of “work” is different for PR people than for journalists. If
a company can get one person to bite on their press release, they’ve
done their job.
A reporter has to parse through all the crud they
find and turn it into something usable, and as a result, the
signal-to-noise ratio is largely worth it for the few times there is in
fact signal.
Now, there are some reporters that just hate
them—and for good reason. For every reporter like Biggs who complains
about press releases, there are websites that claim, excitedly, to
automate the process of sending out press releases en masse—
by offering search tools or
ways to better target journalists. (On the other hand,
this goes both ways.)
But
the thing is, in 2015, you honestly don’t need a press release to get
your voice heard. In fact, your company would probably be better off
with a blog, a Twitter account, and a willingness to write about
something other than yourself every once in a while.
A good example of this kind of mindset in action is from the popular social media startup Buffer,
which publishes blog posts about
every social-media-related topic under the sun basically, selling the
idea of itself as a great spot to find ideas about a topic near and
dear to the company’s heart.
Who needs a press release when you can build your own Gutenberg press for pennies on the dollar?
