A badly timed press release darkened my desk (should I say inbox these days) this morning as I sat down to my first caffeine hit of the day. The research release for the ‘Writing for Publication Masterclass’ announced: ‘Only 3% of editors say PR articles are "well written", says survey’. Scary stuff indeed and, while the research is obviously self-serving, it should hit home to those who think all coverage is equal in value regardless of content.
Ever feel yourself ticking off coverage quotas, filing another piece of coverage and forgetting about it? Another one in the bag and another win on the PR versus journalist scorecard? If this is you then this release should be even more worrying.
With the continued development of online publications, the growth in ‘fast media’ like blogs and the rapidly shrinking news rooms all over the country, the focus has never been further away from ensuring quality content is posted. Unfortunately, in many cases, the need to break stories and to make sure that publications are the fastest, most up-to-date 24 hr news services around, is coming well ahead of quality assurance.
The pressure to get things up and ‘done and dusted’ is also feeding through to PR and this is where the release should hurt. Many publications try to get a certain amount of contributed articles up each month with a quota that must be filled regardless of quality. So that’s a great thing isn’t it? PRs can reel off any old article and get it printed saving time and money! Likewise being in charge of the corporate blog makes things even easier, as long as we keep getting the right volume of blogs up everything is great! Or is it?
No - this definitely isn’t the way things should be going. Yes you might be able to get something slightly sub-standard printed (much to the editor’s dismay no doubt) but this is of no value whatsoever to clients. If it’s pants no one will read it and your client message will be lost, no argument – this is PR 101 and anyone calling themselves a PRO should know it.
In true PR style I feel I should issue a call to action to in-house and agency PROs alike: Remember the reason behind your coverage. Make it good and make it salient so your client has the best chance of getting some value out of it.
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