Focus on press release training

A few facts for you: a recent survey of 200 journalists, conducted by PWR New Media, found that:

• 87% of journalists want their press releases by email
• 79% said they were more likely to cover a story if the press release was sent with high resolution images
• 91% of journalists said that having easy access to relevant background, biographies, and supporting information is very important when researching a story – the contents of your media toolkit.

These journalists were in the USA, but the same applies in the UK. If you contact a journalist about a story, the chances are they’ll ask you to send a press release in order to have the basic facts in front of them in black and white.

But their in-boxes are so deluged, that to have any chance of making it into the newspaper or onto air, when you send a press release, you really have to include the right ingredients, present it in the right way, and write it in a way that will really grab the reader’s attention.

All this is important, because the journalist will make almost instantaneous decisions about whether or not a journalist decides to run your story or spike it (an old fashioned term left over from the days when each journalist would have a metal ‘spike’ on their desk for their used press release – a very primitive filing system.)

So you have to make it easy for them to run your story.

This is the type of information that you’ll learn from our press release training. 

On our courses, we aim to answer all your questions:

• How does the media work?
• What makes a good story?
• Why don’t the media cover my stories at the moment?
• When should I send my press release?
• How often should I send one?
• Who should I send it to?
• How should I send it?
• What should it look like?
• And most importantly, how do I write it in a way that will compel the journalist to cover it?

Everyone gets the chance to discuss their own stories, and we work out how to make them stand out, and we look at some real live press releases – good and bad.

Then it’s time to get to work, write pitches or press releases. The aim is always to have them ready for distribution by the time we wrap up.

As well as running these courses in-house for organisations and companies, we often run press release training on behalf of trade associations and membership bodies. If you think your members would benefit, please do contact us on 020 8332 6200 or info@roughhouse.co.uk.

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