In Week 3 you promoted yourself, this week you will promote someone else. As a sports information, or public relations person in the sports industry, you will write a lot of news/press releases. Simply working in the sports industry, you will read a lot of them too. Either way, you should be familiar with, and know how to write, these releases.
Please read the Week 7 lesson, and sample news releases. Write your own news release for this week’s discussion. The news release must be written directly in the discussion, DO NOT upload it in a Word document. The goal is to make it easy for your classmate to read your news release, and uploading increases the necessary steps to get there.
Here is the wk 7 lesson
ast week you promoted yourself, this week you will promote someone else. As a sports information, or public relations person in the sports industry, you will write a lot of news/press releases. Simply working in the sports industry, you will read a lot of them too! Either way, you should be familiar with, and know how to write, these releases.
Press or news releases are used to inform the media about something newsworthy in an effort to garner coverage for a person, place, or thing. This could be something about a person, team, event, new facility, or anything else an organization is trying to promote.
The release should provide who, what, where, when, why, and how in the first one or two sentences. This is the opening paragraph, and should never be more than one paragraph.
The body of the news release should provide additional information pertinent to the subject. Depending on the release, the body should be one or two paragraphs, with each paragraph being three to five sentences. The body is the story part of the news release.
The last paragraph is the boilerplate. This provides an overview of the company or organization, a quick snapshot. This is similar to the About Us section of most company websites, although the boilerplate may be a shortened version.
All press releases need to include point of contact information, which goes at the very top. There should also be something that signifies the end. Many public relations people will center ### at the bottom of the page to signify the end. In the sports industry it is also common to see the team name, initials, or such at the end of the list.
Listed below are some links with additional information about writing news releases. Please review this information to help prepare you for this week’s discussion.
How to Write a Press Release?
So, how to write a press release? That’s a million dollar question. If done right, it can indeed bring you a million dollars in revenue. Let’s get started by answering what a press release is.
“A press release is simply a statement prepared for distribution to the news media announcing something claimed as having news value with the intent of gaining media coverage.”
A press release consists of following elements:
Headline
The headline is the first single line of text in the press release and tells what the press release is about. It can be a very effective tool to grab the attention of the journalists, so writing it from a journalists perspective is very important. Think what headlines catch your eyes in the newspaper.
The headline should be descriptive but not too long. For the later reason, PRLog limits it to 100 characters. The headline should be formatted in title case, that is, each word in the sentence should have first letter capitalized, and rest of the letters in lowercase. Acronyms can be in uppercase.
Summary
The summary lets you build up your chance to sell your press release to the journalist. It is generally a requirement of online press release services. Identify a unique feature about your product or service and then write how it is going to revolutionize the world.
The summary should be a single paragraph with about three to five lines. Beyond 250 characters is too long, so this is the limit for PRLog. All sentences in the summary should be in sentence case, that is, only first letter of a sentence should be capital, and all others should be lowercase. Again, acronyms can be all capital letters.
Body
Dateline
The dateline contains the release date of the press release and usually also the originating city of the press release. For online press release services like PRLog, the date stamp is automatic and should not be entered.
Introduction
The introduction is where the press release body starts. It is the first paragraph in a press release, that generally gives basic answers to the questions of who, what, when, where and why.
Details
The details come after the introduction. It gives further explanation, statistics, background, or other details relevant to the news and also serves to back up whatever claims were made in the introductory paragraph.
The body should be around 3000 characters or 450 words. The body should have a minimum of two paragraphs. All paragraphs should be ideally between 5 to 8 lines each. There should be a blank line after each paragraph for good visibility.
About
The about section is also called the “boilerplate” as it used over and over again. It is generally a short section providing background information on the press release issuing company or organization.
Media Contact Information
This section contains the contact information like name, phone number, email address, mailing address, etc for the media relations contact person. For good credibility, the email address should be the same as the organization the press release is about. For example, if the press release is about an organization with a website called abcd.com, then the email address should be email_address@abcd.com.
General Tips
A press release should be written in third person. Instead of using we, us and ours, your should be using they, them and theirs.
It is very useful to look at other people’s press releases. Feel free to take a look at the most viewed press releases, as it usually gives a lot of insight into how to write a press release.
https://www.theguardian.com/small-business-network/2014/jul/14/how-to-write-press-release
https://www.viasport.ca/communications-toolkit/module-6-eleven-common-press-release-mistakes
