Writing

Imagine this: Your company has an exciting new product, service or achievement to share, and you’ve been tasked with writing a press release to get the word out to the media. You’ve taken your time, carefully curating the proper information and crafting the release with painstaking precision. Finally, it’s ready, you’ve released it to the press, and…crickets. Perhaps it’s time to switch up your strategy.

Survey after survey returns the same verdict: writing remains one of the constants when it comes to success in communications. For that reason it never hurts for PR pros to try to improve their writing. FleishmanHillard SVP and senior partner Rich Eichwald tells you how to become a better writer by using your ears…and your feet.

Brand newsrooms are becoming an essential part of any business venture, but too often they become a repository for press releases and marketing materials. With the right strategy and editorial direction, a brand newsroom can transform into an engaging content hub to help you truly connect with your readers. The question is, how to take your brand newsroom to the next level? Here are some tips from Monster’s B2C content lead.

While presenting the award for Video of the Year, Madonna took the opportunity to deliver a lengthy speech about how her career was inadvertently started by the late singer and undisputed Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin, who died the Thursday prior. Reactions to the speech were overwhelmingly negative, with amateur and professional critics alike voicing their belief that Madonna disrespected Aretha by making the speech largely about Madonna, relegating Aretha’s influence to nothing but a footnote in Madonna’s story of her own rise to stardom.

There was a gathering of editors from leading D.C. publications whose job includes evaluating op-ed submissions from outside writers. Their tips on how to get published amounted to a clinic for authors. A major takeaway was that while editors want jargon-free submissions with strong points of view, each publication has certain preferences. This means the road to success for media pitchers is to know those preferences.

In each edition of PR News we highlight takeaways from an article or articles as well as additions to the PR News Resource Center, which is available only to subscribers at https://www.prnewsonline.com/subscriber-resources/

Whether they’re writing media pitches, RFPs, blog posts, white papers, social posts, content marketing pieces or press releases, PR pros are usually serving several entities. The net result of writing on behalf of so many entities: messy, vague word hash. No PR writer is immune to this syndrome and the amount of native talent one has is no defense against it.

These summer reading recommendations for PR pros might not show you how to get your brand message through the media clutter, but they will inspire you with their storytelling qualities, humor and, in some cases, exceptional research.

PR News’ community on Twitter has been voting for the most overused clichés over the past several weeks—using the hashtag #WordsBracket—through five rounds of brackets. Apparently PR practitioners need a nice long break from hearing the word “engage” but, admittedly, it’ll be hard to find a workable replacement for it.

We’re down to just two contenders in PR News’ 2018 Most Overused PR Words & Phrases Tournament: “thought leader” and “engage.” PR News’ community on Twitter has been voting for the past several weeks through four rounds of brackets. This time around “thought leader” bested “industry-leading,” and “engage” edged out “elevate.” The shockers of this year’s tournament so far are the relatively early exits of “at the end of the day” and “quite frankly.”