I came across a good article in Beaupre & Company’s newsletter, on why the lead paragraph of a press release should read like a journalistic piece, not an announcement. There is a fine line between crafting a press release to sound like news (which it ought to be) and a memo to all. The worst thing that can happen, the article says, is to hit the reader with abstractions, opaqueness and ponderous inward-directed claims.

They cite a typical example of press release-ese, and a version by a law firm that wriote it with the hook in the headline. So I checked some company press releases, and needless to say they all seem to come off the same template. Some examples:

"At a launch event yesterday evening at the ……….in New York City, Company X introduced the first mass appeal, talk programming format expressly for women, by women."

"Company Y today launched a spin-off communications agency called …….. that will operate as a boutique firm specializing in marketing communications and brand-building campaigns. Headquartered in…"

"The nation’s largest wireless carrier is growing its network and meeting the need for enhanced coverage in the greater Memphis area. Company Z today announced that it recently added four new cell sites in the area, ensuring West Tennessee and North Mississippi customers stay connected."

It’s almost as if direct marketers refused to send anything but 6 x 4 mailers. Or all copywriters continued to write in the stilted ad-copy style replete with puns. It’s easy to fall into the we’ve always done it this way’ mentality. But press releases should be leading the charge for change, since they aren’t simply dumped on a web site or sprayed off a nozzle of some automated PR distribution engine. They compete for attention of journalists and analysts in an on-demand world primed by –and determined by social media tools such as RSS, Del.icio.us and Digg.

A good example of how companies now compete with user-generated ‘stories’ can be seen on Digg. Apple’s press release on iTunes 7 talks of the new way to download movie and stream them via the upcoming iTV device. But on Digg, that piece of news got some 75 Diggs at the time this was written. Getting 619 Diggs was a story of ‘First impressions of buying a movie from the iTunes store." A Gizmodo story got 3109 Diggs. (Another one with some 1500 Diggs was a comment by a Digg user who posted this cover of Jobs on the phone with Gates, which to a journalist would provide an unusual perspective for a story, and this sort of thing could never come from a press release.)