Tools & Tactics

News editors have to go through hundreds of news releases every day with two news stories published every minute. So, how do you keep their attention on your news release for a few more moments? I would argue, the headline matters. The Headline is the reader’s entry point to a release. It should be a brief summary or the highlight of the whole release. At PR Newswire, we tell your story to the world; and a good news release should always tell the story in the headline. We use the…

China, a record-holding country: They constructed the longest bridge in the world and they also hold the record for having the most citizens living in one country with the same surname.  Chinese journalists use mobile websites for their research and social media as a form of communication with the PR-Pros more than any other country. TREIBSTOFF (blog site of news aktuell, a subsidiary of German Press Agency to distribute press releases) a spoke with Lynn Liu, Director of Audience Development and Distribution Services at PR Newswire Asia. He explains which changes need…

Journalists get frustrated with PR Professionals. You see it in blog posts and on social media — journalists frustrated with generic, relevant pages and irrelevant material. Pew Research published an analysis of the gap between PR and journalist income, and the relative number of PR professionals to journalists (there are a lot more of the former). With the advent of digital journalism, it is journalists who find their objectivity scrutinized more often than before. It’s not a surprise that many journalists harbor some misgivings for the PR industry. But how can…

I was recently invited to speak to 50 over hotel PR executives in Jakarta at an event organized by Himpunan Humas Hotel (H3) Jakarta, an association for PR professionals in the hotel industry in Jakarta. Besides sharing best practices of press release writing, many questions were raised with regards to how the shift to digital media is changing the PR game. Here are four key takeaways from the sharing session: Listening The late author and PR exec Leonard Saffir once said, “The formulation of a PR strategy properly begins with listening, not talking.” Even in a digital world, getting…

Photo by Camila Damásio on Unsplash A killer headline? Check. A newsworthy, logically crafted, grammar-free main body? Check. So now, what’s missing? Right, the company boilerplate. The inverted pyramid is the most effective and preferred structure in PR writing — so we are told. It might leave people with an impression that what is placed at the bottom of a press release is the most trivial. They might even want to do away with boilerplates entirely as most people believe shorter content is better content due to supposedly being easier to understand and…