Monday, September 21, 2009

How to optimize a news release (brief tutorial)

Now that you've learned how to write a traditional news release, it's time to discuss how to bring this old PR tool into the 21st century! After all, the media landscape has changed tremendously since Ivy Lee issued the first news release a little more than 100 years ago. It only makes sense that we adapt this old tool to today's media reality. And that reality is complex: publics don't just receive their news from traditional media outlets anylonger and they don't just passively consume news either. They receive news from their social networks and likewise share news with those networks. As a result, we need to change the way we think about news distribution. I have embedded the class notes on how to optimize a news release below. You won't see any of the animations since I had to convert the slides to a PDF file, but the content is essentially the same:

List of sites mentioned in class: