"What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.” — The Captain, Warden, Florida Div. of Corrections, Road Prison 36

In this late-summer slowdown of buy-group shows and preparations for the famed Golden Quarter—which is actually more like four months—this might be an ideal time to talk about your press releases.

This isn’t directed at everybody—just the ones that suck at press release writing. I’d add “and you know who you are,” but judging by your releases, you clearly don’t.

PR Writing Ain’t Hard
The first time I was tasked with writing a press release, I had no clue what to do. None. I had never written one before and had no idea where to start.

Fortunately for me, my boss at the time, the late Chip Rosse, pointed out the obvious and told me to take an existing press release and rewrite it with the new information the company wanted to announce.

His point was clear: first, this ain’t rocket science, so just get to writing. Second—and probably the most important point—it’s all been done before.

Every day we run a number of press releases in the Outdoor Wire Digital Network. So far this year, we’ve published a total of just over 17,000 releases. Granted, that number includes duplicates across multiple wires, especially The Shooting Wire, The Tactical Wire, and The Dealer Wire.

What that number does not include—obviously—is the huge number of press releases we receive but do not run. Our email inboxes are flooded every weekday with news from this industry, as well as others.

What this means is, if you have to write a press release, chances are there’s one you can replicate, being published on any given day in one of our wires. Use them as your template.

Congratulations! You’re Using AI
It’s clear by the structure of several press releases we’ve received that many of you are using AI to do the writing for you.

There are times when AI makes sense, and I’ve had conversations with some in the industry that are using AI in smart, creative ways to offload what might be mundane yet important work. Work that would also be hugely time consuming.

That makes sense.

But if you’re being asked to tell people about your product, company, or organization and you cannot articulate that in your own words, having instead to off-load that task to AI, then you might, indeed, have a “failure to communicate.”

By the way, when AI plugs in the nifty emojis before your contact info, it’s what we call a clue. Not to mention the random bolded words throughout your press release. Bold words and phrases scream, “Don’t bother with the rest of this gibberish, just pay attending to my boldness.”

In other words, use the bold feature sparingly.

I Don’t Have Anybody to Write Releases
The “I don’t have anybody to write my press releases” is code for “I’m not paying somebody to write press releases.”

Cool. We get it. You don’t want to spend any money, especially on somebody to do the work you can do but simply don’t. Yeah, that makes all the sense in the world.

Here’s a better idea. Find somebody and pay them. There, I’ve just solved your lack of PR problem, and I didn’t even charge you. You can thank me later.

Blog Posts, They’re Not Press Releases
You’d be surprised how many obvious blog posts we receive as press releases. Even more surprising is how many are submitted by agencies.

Blog posts are for posting on your blog. It’s literally in the name. Sure, you can email out that post to your in-house email newsletter list. But, when you send it to us to run in one of our wires and you don’t rewrite the intro, leaving it as is, that’s just plain lazy.

If you’re being paid to write blog posts or other long-form content, then go that extra mile and format it as a press release—at least for the introductory part.

Maybe Try Looking at Your Email Before Sending It
Haveyoueverseen anannouncementwhereall thewordsruntogetherwhithhardlyany wordspacing?

Well, we have. Now, when it’s not just one sentence, like the above, but an entire document, you begin to ask the simple question: Did anybody look at this before hitting send?

It’s clearly a formatting issue. But HTML email services provide you with the ability to send test emails so you can not only preview the layout, and confirm the images load and hyperlinks are all correct, but also see if there are any catastrophic formatting issues that carried over.

Perhaps this feature could be utilized.

Cutting and pasting from another document has its perils. If you have ever seen a press release that appeared with errant punctuation marks, like? a question? mark? in nonsensical? places, then you’ve seen hidden formatting rear its ugly head.

This happens more than we care to admit, and more times than we care to fix.

We Need Awards to Hand Out
This is not the first time I’ve written about writing press releases. Hell, it’s not even the fifth. But since the advice given has fallen on deaf ears, it presents us with a unique opportunity.

Recently, after reading a press release in which I counted no less than 10 exclamation points, it dawned on me we really do need to start giving out awards, and certainly in more than one category.

The most exclamation points used in the a single press release is one award category we would definitely adopt.

I’d also be good with one for using the phrase “is thrilled to.” Unfortunately, that would have to be a participation award because far too many keep using this hackneyed phrase in the first line of their release. To single out just one company or agency for a trophy would be impossible. And, a trophy would be out of the question. Instead….

The Outdoor Wire Digital Network is thrilled to announce winners of this category will receive a lovely certificate of completion. To receive your certificate—suitable for framing, and we hope you do—send a self-addressed stamped envelope to….

A couple other award categories would likely be something along the lines of: I Didn’t Proof-Read My Press Release; What’s My Point? I Don’t Know; and, my second favorite after the exclamation point one, This Press Release Is A Blog Post I Didn’t Want To Rewrite.

We’d of course have to come up with an award for the company that writes their own releases—poorly—and despite having done several has failed to improve on their writing. This award would be the In-House Press Release Writer of the Year award.

Naturally, we’d refer to this as the Struggle Bus Award, but only amongst ourselves.

— Paul Erhardt, Managing Editor, the Outdoor Wire Digital Network