Blog Herald Column

My latest column is up at the Blog Herald. As promised, it’s about the Optimized News Release. I’ve not really gone into anything too contraversial following the “storm in a blog post” between Shel and Stowe but I think it’s a good primer for people who haven’t heard about it before.

Here’s a little teaser – but make sure you get over there and read the whole thing!

Introduction
Is social media changing the way you work? My job as a PR/online communications consultant has changed an awful lot since I started as an intern cutting articles out of a newspaper or transcribing entire electoral rolls into an Excel sheet. There are a metric ton of examples I could use (monitoring, who we reach out to, client based initiatives) but the biggest one is, I believe, the communications vehicle formerly known as the “press release”.

Evolution of the “New Media News Release”
100 years ago, back when the media was all print-based, press releases (named after the printing press) were sent to newspaper and magazine reporters as a way of pitching a story. As the “media” extended into broadcast (radio and later television) the press release became the “news release” to include the new media. Much beloved by PRs, the news release is equally hated by journalists who are constantly spammed with committee written corporate-ese. However, after a famous post by technology journalist Tom Foremski called “Die Press Release! Die! Die! Die!“, a number of the PR community saw how the traditional news release could be remastered for the social media age.