Readers will go to this information if they have made it all the way through the release, because you have done enough to intrigue them. So take it just as seriously as the rest of the piece. The footer is a distinct, and in some mechanical way, separated paragraph summary of your company. This is [...]

The headline and the summary and leading paragraphs have hopefully done their jobs of drawing people into your news release. Now it’s time to fully explain what you are up to, why people should care, and get into the nitty-gritty of how or what’s being done. You want to be sure the five W questions [...]

So here’s what everybody does, and has done forever … WhizBang Technologies, the leading provider of something or other, and ThingDoodle Systems, a leading provider of ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ That’s how companies are announcing their exploits to to the world. By inducing comas. Stop it. Just stop it. Press releases are no longer mechanisms to induce journalists [...]

The headline is your key line, the key statement that is either going to get people reading the rest of the piece and compel editors and bloggers to do something with it, or move on. This is not newspaper style headline writing, for which headlines are a craft. You don’t need to be clever. You [...]

I spend a lot of time with this blog slapping around companies that do a truly terrible job of media communications, and by pointing out the mistakes, trying to educate them and others. But I don’t want to dwell on the negative stuff, and thought it might be useful to put readers through the basics [...]