How to write and distribute a press release and a pitch for your business It’s my Silver Jubilee so I am writing one myself too — EASTWEST Public Relations
On a phone call yesterday with this Chinese journalist from CGTN and CCTV who was interviewing a client of ours today, she said it’s very good now. In the past, she had a beat, and she was only allowed to cover stories where she could go and visit the person she was interviewing or someone in the same timezone. But she said since COVID, they now have a global remit, so the impact of COVID has been that they’ve been liberated from their beats, and now, journalists like Xia who lives in London can cover stories all over the world. She was interested in my Singapore context. It’s really important to spend some time, if you’re getting ready to send out press releases, to work on the facts and the figures so that your press release has got some detail. Make sure that you’ve got good quality photographs, infographics, and diagrams, because that is what the journalists will use to assemble the story. And as I’ve mentioned before, in the reports by Cision on the State of the Media, the journalists have almost no time at all, and while they may be getting up to 100 pitches per week, majority of what they’re sent is irrelevant. In other words, in order to move out of the 100 and be in the top 10 that they might write about in a week, we need our pitches to be accurate, informative, and well supported with other information so that journalists can take what they like, fashion that into the narrative that suits their readers, so they don’t have to go online and do the searching and the formatting and making the color and the pictures look presentable. That’s our job and, of course, this is why over half of the content on the internet and in media now is provided by agencies and by customers and clients because actually, we’re all providing the, if you like, labor and the raw materials for the media to come together and to publish the stories.
Originally published at https://www.eastwestpr.com.
