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Submitting Press Releases to the BTG
Dateline: 22nd December, 2005
In spite of the fact that Christmas is just three days away, the spate
of press releases hasn't reduced at all. We're still getting at least
a dozen every day. We try to use most of them - or, at least, those
which we think will be of interest to our readers - but some don't get
used at all.
Why?
- Press releases submitted as image files are on a hiding to nothing,
really. They'll not get used unless there's nothing else. Why? Because
we have to retype all the information by hand, swicthing between the
image as it is displayed in the email program or the image editing
program and the BTG page. It's time-consuming and, frankly, annoying.
- Although written in plain text, or as a Word file, they are full
of whole sentences in capital letters. This is difficult to read and
feels like the writer is shouting at you, so they have to be retyped
- which is (see above!).
- Incidentally, don't send a press release as a PDF. Copying and pasting
from this kind of file produces lots of line breaks which have to
be removed and replaced with spaces or carriage returns, and that
is also....
- They are full of spelling, punctuation and/or grammatical errors,
so they don't have to be retyped so much as rewritten - and they don't
inspire much confidence in the quality of the work being produced.
Everyone can make an error now and then - we do, we know - but....
- They make ridiculous claims. Amateur companies which say that what
they produce is as good as anything you'll see in the West End or
professional companies (or writers) which claim to be rescuing British
theatre from its sad and old-fashioned state are ignored. We would
take such claims from the RSC or the National with a pinch of salt:
from a new company without a track record they are laughable.
- The information is incomplete: you would be surprised at how many
press releases fail to tell us the where or the when!
- They are irrelevant to the site: we don't review or run news stories
on stand-up comedy, pop, rock, classical music or jazz, unless there
is an obvious theatre connection. For the record, we are interested
in theatre of all kinds (including musicals and children's theatre,
as well as some of the more obscure styles like site-specific and
even street theatre), dance (ballet and contemporary), opera and operetta.
We really do want to make the BTG as comprehensive as possible but
the time we have to spend on it is limited - no one at the BTG gets
paid and what little income we generate is used for expenses such a
hosting fees, which are not small for hosts which, like ours, offer
a commercial, professional service with guaranteed up-time and unlimited
bandwidth, not to mention large amounts of web space for the almost
4,000 pages we have currently.
Incidentally, you might also like to look at our article on email
press releases: it contains a lot of other information which will
help ensure that your release is used.
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