Nobody cares about your press releases.
Advancement offices are generally tasked among other things with “telling the story of the university”. A big part of this task involves attracting media attention. After all, the news media have the big horn. They command a big audiences: The morning newspaper readers; The local evening news watchers; The big national magazine readers, etc…
While media attention is important, I’d like to think that a quickly emerging priority involves telling those stories ourselves, without going through editors and reporters and press releases. I’m talking about storytelling on the web.
Some do a great job. A majority do the bare minimum, which consists of:
Hey, I know, let’s regurgitate our boring press releases and post them online.
Well I’ve got news for those people. My generation isn’t concerned with AP Style. We’re kind’ve past that. (Beneath it? or Above it?) We’re getting our news in other ways. We’re finding more interesting content through social bookmarking and rss feeds. We self-select for the good stuff, and refuse to be force-fed the traditional offering. In a sense, we act as our own news editors. Over time we develop our own sources for focused news that we care about. We pay attention to trusted blogs maintained by curators who have proven over time to provide the most interesting and engaging content.
Because content is king.
And in the same way that the dominance of the railroads of the 1800′s was usurped by the automobile, I see traditional news media losing ground and receding, back to something of lesser influence compared to content creators empowered with internet connections, content management, and interesting stories. ..Throw in compelling photography, video, and audio and who needs traditional media? We don’t have to ride your train anymore, Mr Conductor. We can get in our car and go wherever we want.
If we woke up tomorrow morning and everybody behaved like myself and those in my peer group, here’s your new reality:
Your audience size and your influence depend only your skill as a storyteller, not on your promotional budget or your relationship with the news editor.
It will happen. The question is, to what degree.
In any case, nobody cares about your press releases. Those that do; those that want to read them, are a dying breed.
Am I totally off base here? Do you agree? Disagree?
I think you are right and that higher ed has been about story telling for a long time. Just look at the trend in admissions materials. They are almost all story based. However I do think that you can use the web to drive media attention. We had a really good hit in the spring during the PA primary when we put up a story about one of our Political Science professors who is a presidential historian.
I do not disagree.
But, you are never going to convince PR that they shouldn’t keep putting out press releases. You also aren’t going to convince them that they need to find a new way of telling stories. That is their function. And in that regard, I don’t actually believe that people like “us” are their target. Press releases are generally put out for consumption by other news entities. It just so happens we as web guys and gals are trapped into running feeds of these releases on our home pages, because, well, there needs to be something there, and universities generally lack the progressiveness and creativity to do otherwise.
Sure, you and I could come up with great, creative, storybased, “Web 2.0″ flavored media that could relate “news” in a way that is new and fresh, but that’s not our job (thank Buddha). And traditional PR isn’t the environment for that kind of information.
This is why I’m a big fan of the idea of a Web Communications or New Media style office. Address new problems with a new solution.
I like this, I think I have something for a new blog at .eduGuru. Thanks.
Great points michael and paul. I was pretty off target with this post, I’ll admit it. Journalism and PR aren’t really in my background, so I’m coming at this from the standpoint of a web designer/producer with a singular goal of creating content and online experiences that move people. Outside of that desire, I’m fairly ignorant on this topic. Press releases are a stale, dry, formulaic, way of providing quick facts. They serve an important function, but they don’t speak to me, or to a growing majority of web visitors.
@drew: I don’t think you’re off target at all. Press releases were always meant to be RELEASED… that means sent out to the media. How that happens has changed with RSS and Twitter and journalists are increasingly turning to blogs and other sources for story ideas, but the idea is still the same. It’s ok to still write press releases, but the release needs to be news worthy. An historian who just published a book on presidential debates is newsworthy days before a debate. A change in your dining hall hours probably is not.
Put the press releases on your site if you must (with an RSS feed), but don’t confuse them with news and stories meant to be consumed by your web audiences. Press releases are written in AP style with just enough info (e.g. a pithy generic quote from the President) to tease a journalist into wanting more info. If you’re going to write news on your site for the public to see, take the time to make a story out of it. Add some video. Relate it to additional content on your site and most of all– make it interesting enough to justify the space it fills.
Drew,
I would agree that just converting a traditional press release to the web just doesn’t work. The problem is that people just consume content online differently which you also addressed. If you are going to take a press release and put it only then it’s got to be formated for the web. Do your semantic markup, include lists, bullet points. People like pictures, multimedia and links to external content. I guess you could call it a press release 2.0?
So yes you can reuse it, but not in a copy and paste way. Rethink and redo the material because remember people scan more online than they do really critically read and we like options and flavor in our content.
As someone who works in a PR office at a major university, I understand the frustration of how press releases get lost in the mill. In the last 18 months though, our efforts have dramatically changed and are trying to tell the stories ourselves, while still taking the time to pitch to the news media. A good example is this video that we put out last week: http://www1.umn.edu/urelate/newsservice/Multimedia_Videos/drum_major.htm
We put this on YouTube also and in a few instances, we pitch to blogs and media organizations to post our video. Without things like this, it is hard to get a lot of the new media style members attention. I think this is the perfect convergence of the two.
Great post and I love this blog. Thanks!
Thanks Liz. I think we’re on the same page. Getting local/regional media attention is still top priority, but there is a growing online audience that bypasses that traditional outlet.
[...] read an interesting post by the “College Web Guy.” I won’t regurgitate the entire blog post but the question posed is whether or not people care about our press releases. My initial thought [...]