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Email Press ReleasesDateline: 5th September, 2004Most theatre companies are very good at postal press reelases: an email press release is a very different thing! This is by way of being a bit of self-preservation! Well, that's probably a bit strong, but it what I have to say will make my life easier (and the lives of other theatre website editors) and will ensure press releases stand a chance of being used. In the run-up to and during the Edinburgh Fringe, press releases sent by post were landing on my doormat at the rate of about three of four a day: for email press releases, you can multiply that figure by at least ten. Even under normal (i.e.non-Fringe) circumstances, I get about half a dozen or so email releases every day. Some will never be run under any circumstances, for their authors seem to have gone out of their way to make using them difficult, so here are a few dos and don'ts which, if followed, will make their use more likely, although the editor, whether of a website or a print publication, will make the final decision on the basis of how much interest the release is likely to be to his/her readers. If the story is good, it will be used, no matter how badly presented or difficult the press release: if it isn't... well, it may be used if the sender makes it easy. Don't put the release in the body of the email: that means that the editor has to make an immediate decision to use it or not there and then, or shuffle it into a separate folder which (s)he may or may not have time to go back to later. And there are other text problems, too: see later when we talk about PDF files. Do send it as an attachment, preferably in Word format. Even if you don't use Word, your word processor will be able to save it in Word format because that's the WP most people use. If you are sending images, don't incorporate them into the Word file. Do send them separately as GIFs or JPGs. The problems mentioned in the next paragraph are the reason. Don't send your release as a PDF file. Yes, it looks good and you can place your images whever you want them to make it look very pretty, but if we want to use the images, we have to use the Print Screen function on the keyboard, open up an image-editing program, then pastes the whole screen into the image window. We then have to use the crop tool to isolate the picture, then save it as a JPG or GIF. If we want to use another image, even if it's on the same page in the PDF file, we have to paste the screen grab into the image-editor again, and then go through the cropping and saving rigmarole again. Are we going to go to all that trouble except for a major news story? Of course we aren't! Incidentally PDF text also causes problems: first we have to select the Text tool in the Acrobat Reader, then highlight the text we want to use, copy it and paste it into the webpage. Unfortunately - like text copied and pasted from most email programs - there will be a line break at the end of every one of the original's lines, so we have to go through the lot replacing every <br> tag with a space. Except, of course, that paragraphs will have two <br> tags and they need to be replaced with a carriage return! That's two passes, and it has to be done manually rather than by using Find and Replace to make sure no errors occur. So that's why the body of an email and PDF files are definitely don'ts! Don't call your Word file something like Press Release or Release (date) or Release 7/1 or whatever. You see, that's what everybody does, so in my Attachments folder I have loads and loads of documents entitled Press Release. In order to find out which is which, I then have to open all of them! No, give your file a name like Romeo and Juliet by Lovely TC (or something along those lines), so that I (and all other editors) can see at a glance what they are. Don't use lots of capital letters. It's the done thing in printed press releases because it draws attention to significant names, and that's OK because everything has to be retyped anyway, but for email press releases, we want to cut and paste, and certainly don't want to have to go through retyping all for-emphasis caps into lower case. Do keep your releases short and to the point. In the past I have received press releases which are five - yes, five or even more - pages long. Give the basic story in the main body of the release, a few explanatory notes to follow, and a phone or email conatct for further information. The only exception to this rule is season listings which obviously have to be as long as they need to be. Following these simple rules will mean that your release has a much better chance of being used. And it will make the editor's life easier, so (s)he will love you. But remember: what we're looking for is a good story. If your story isn't going to inetrest readers, it won't be used, no matter how well presented it may be. Articles Indices:
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