According to Eric Auchard, technology correspondent for Reuters, “The best way for companies to deal with news media is to treat reporters like a hungry teenagers.” He goes on to say, “We’re impatient…we’re on deadlines and we need to be fed. If we’re not fed, we get angry and have tantrums.” In offering this view to the Bulldog Reporter’s Daily Dog newsletter a few months ago, he reaffirmed the vital role that the oft-maligned news release plays in helping reporters do their job.

As you may recall from my previous blogs, I am a big fan of news releases as they have evolved into valuable marketing tools for high-tech companies. In the Q&A that follows (excerpted from the Daily Dog interview), Auchard reminds us that news releases still hold great value doing what they were originally intended to do — provide reporters with a succinct, factual summary of a news development.

Why are you pro-press release when so many of your colleagues aren’t?

Press releases are spit upon by the press and they really shouldn’t be. They are very important commodities in the reporting process. We need the information in them to do things like fact check our stories, for starters. So the press release certainly isn’t dead—or, at least, I don’t want it to be. We want product details, specs, contacts, facts, data—and we can find that in press releases. So please send them.

The irony is that many in PR and even the people at Google aren’t doing releases like they should or like they used to. They seem to have bought into complaints from some in the press that releases are boring or useless and that’s just not the case. Some of this may be an effect of the blogosphere, where bloggers have made fun of press releases. The idea seems to be, “Don’t give me the press release—just the facts, please.” But that doesn’t scale.

Sure, every journalist, writer and blogger wants to focus on the meaningful stuff. But press releases are full of things that are boring and necessary to file a story, including the spelling of names, correct capitalizations of funky technology names, and even boiler plates that give you a definition and context about the business and market. Sometimes, even the dateline is important—it tells us where the company is headquartered. And sometimes, it’s the contact information that’s what we need because we can’t find it anywhere else.

Are you saying that companies just aren’t providing press releases anymore—or that the releases they’re providing aren’t useful?

I’m saying both things. One trend we’re seeing is companies not sending releases at all. And another is that releases may be coming too late, for starters. For example, a lot of PR people tell us they’ll get us the release after a briefing. Well, that’s useless. We need it before the briefing so we can ask more informed questions. We don’t want to have to ask the basic factual questions that you can just put in the release for us.

Can you give an example?

Google typically does its announcements on its blogs. The bigger announcements that impact investors, of course, are done in releases. So, we’ll get a call and get briefed and whatever we hear is over the phone.

Why is that a problem for the media—or company?

I have repeatedly had interviews with high-level executives at Google and other places, where I would have had more context and been able to ask more focused questions if I would have had a press release ten minutes in advance. The benefits to the companies and PR people would be: shorter interviews, livelier quotes and more significant interviews that get to the real story or correct angle. If you have a real long press release about a complicated issue like a partnership—that gives us context, for example. It also lets us know how you see, and are positioning, the announcement. Conversely, just stringing together a bunch of facts in a phone conversation or post is where things can go wrong in the reporting process.

Everybody in PR knows the more you give reporters the information they need, the more you control the story. The more you make us fish, the more we go off the reservation and find our own ideas. Of course, reporters should remain independent, but the less you help, the more potential there becomes for negative and incorrect stories.

Tags: Big-M Marketing, news releases, press releases

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