Pity the poor press release. Looked on as a lower form of wordsmithing than news writing by journalists around the globe for decades, it is now getting knocked down further on the content ladder by the blog, video and even status update and tweet.
But look closer and you’ll discover a dirty little secret of local newspapers: they have always been filled with press release-like content. (Much of it re-written slightly by a reporter or editor to make it look like journalism.) And in the era of “doing more with less,” the ratio of news that is generated by a press release is only going to increase.
Just as technology is improving other forms of content, it’s also giving the press release new life and a new purpose. For example, Albany, NY-based readMedia has developed a press release engine that can take a dean’s list from a college with 5,000 names on it and generate a unique “story” for each zip code and pump out hundreds or thousands of individual press releases to local media outlets based on the students in their local areas. A particular town or some zip code can receive a press release from the school about one student.
“It’s the kind of stuff that has appeared in weekly newspapers forever,” readMedia president and CEO Colin Mathews said. “It’s their bread and butter.”
Matthews says that, instead of aggregating content, his company is aggregating the creators of the content. Schools, military and state agencies pay for the readMedia service because it allows them to localize and distribute information quickly and efficiently. While still in its early stages, the company is on track to generate 250,000 “stories” this year for the 15,000 zip codes it is currently covering.
A pilot project with the Hearst-owned Albany Times Union is helping the company connect an audience to all this content. Like a lot of newspapers, the Times-Union has created separate sections for towns and other distinct geographic areas it covers. But most newspapers don’t have the resources to fill those pages with content the way they would like, so readMedia’s free widgets fill out the pages with highly localized content.
As Matthews likes to point out, a lot of local press releases are basic, nuts-and-bolts types of stories. It is information that can be created by software because it is the facts that make or break them, not writing style or investigative reporting. An event is happening, someone won an award or was arrested for a crime, a new business is opening. It’s news, especially on a local level, but has always been a highly manual process. Until now.
