How to become a favorite PR specialist among the media and consistently publish press releases: the opinion of journalists
To successfully interact with journalists, you need to understand what exactly they expect from the press service. We studied a global survey of journalists on this topic, conducted our own research within the editorial office of Interfax, and are sharing the main insights.
Editors and journalists of various media receive dozens, sometimes hundreds of press releases a day. PR services think that they send interesting materials, but often get rejected for publication or even ignored. Why does this happen?
We looked for an answer to this question at Mediasreda , a traditional large SCAN event for PR specialists, where top industry experts were invited. Yulia Mikhailova, head of the SCAN project, shared data from chile mobile database the large-scale State of the Media 2023 report from the American company Cision, which surveyed more than 3,000 journalists around the world. And although there were no representatives of Russian media among those surveyed, we can consider the survey results relevant for our country as well — media trends have recently become increasingly global.
Write press releases in human language
The press release format has been buried for years. But let's see if journalists themselves agree with this, and how they rate a press release in terms of reliability and usefulness.
According to journalists' responses, the press release is ranked third among sources they trust:
27% of journalists trust news agencies,
23% - industry experts,
20% - press releases.
At the same time, press releases are the undisputed leader in the list of the most useful sources:
Rating of sources that journalists find useful
Rating of sources that journalists find useful
On the Internet, and even in our blog, you will find many articles on how to write a press release . They can and should be used, but only as a guideline, not as a mandatory regulation. Communications are changing, and even government agencies are gradually switching to "human" language - this must be taken into account when working on a press release.