Hello everyone!
Today, as you can tell from the title of this post, I’m gonna talk about press releases and their importance to Pubic Relations.
As you all know, a press release is a free PR tool that aims at attracting media attention to newsworthy information, to an upcoming event or to one that has occurred. The first press release dates back to 1906, when a young man named Ivy Lee used it to talk about a tragedy happened after a train accident in Atlantic City, N.J.
After almost 100 years, despite we live in the age of social media, press releases are still play a central role in spreading news and a wide range of new items, such as:
- scheduled events
- new products or services
- business accomplishments and awards
- sharing data and trends
- addressing issues
For what concerns the PR world, the press releases has been and are still being an invaluable component of PR campaigns and programmes. It can be used and adopted to a great variety of media relations situations: as I already mentioned, as tool to spread news; but also as feature, as starting point for a more extended news feature; it can be the base on which a press conference is underpinned and finally as starting point to communicate with social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter.
Press releases’ importance to PR has also been highlighted by a study conducted by the Guardian’s Nick Davies, which shows how PR practitioners s are successful in leading the news content of quality newspapers.
The PR Girl 