Is it Really RIP For The News Release? - Clea Mayne - UK

Is it really RIP For The Press Release? - Clea Mayne comments from the UK

Here in the UK, I still send out press releases, but many of my press contacts are on my Linkedin so we also swap news that way. Interestingly, I find UK journalists use Linkedin to push out their own news stories even more than PR people use it to circulate press releases. This is all about increasing internet presence for their bylines I expect...
 
Other PR people I've worked with regularly issue a press release that automatically sends a truncated version on Twitter and other social media. This is particularly so in the consumer sector, travel news --- anything that lends itself to short format announcements. In this area of PR it can also help to use Facebook to reach journalists, especially if you're planning an upcoming event e.g. a conference, a product launch, a concert, launch of a cruise ship. They can go to one place to get all their facts etc, plus receive alerts. 
 
Since I work in financial services, and much of my work is B2B, my news content is generally subject to strict regulatory compliance. As a result, I still find it safer to use a written press release format and journalists in my sector don't complain. I'd say my releases are shorter than they used to be when I first started in PR. I rarely go over three short paragraphs, and the third paragraph is usually a quote.  
 
The point of the press release format these days is more about uniformity when posting the release on the company website. The version that goes to the journalists is text in an email. By now, I thought I'd have been issuing press releases as html or as a click through URL but text within an email is still the most popular format.    
 
Over the past ten years or so, UK business journalists increasingly base more of their content on 'views' rather than news. e.g. "Is this the right time to be investing in gold?" This means many of us in my sector spend far more time issuing commentary than we ever do sending out news releases.  
 
If I'm issuing (typically investment) commentary, it's a pdf document produced for clients on a weekly or monthly schedule.  Depending on the topic,  I'll either offer it to one journalist exclusively or issue the commentary to a wider list with a bullet point summary written in the email. I spend far more time these days writing three to five email bullet points than I do writing press releases. A journalist can read the bullet points and know in 5 seconds whether they want to click on the attachment or not.
 
What I expect is different in the UK, is that news rooms depend on PR content even more than they did in the past. We're talking about many, many different media titles just based in London alone. All these news rooms have been downsized many times over, as they compete with the internet. Remaining journalists have to file more stories every day than ever before. One business journalist at Sky News says that her daily routine involves filing her stories for television, plus writing and posting her blog, plus regularing Tweets, plus going into the Sky radio studio to produce daily alerts which go out in syndicated news to all the radio stations that subscribe to Sky for content. 
 
Likewise, many newspaper and magazine journalists (including the weeklies and monthlies) are filing daily news stories on their websites. These stories go out as alerts (often free) to subscribers. I've had journalists call me up and ask me to get my clients to go online and comment on the journalist's blog so it impresses the editor, and increases the journalist's ranking on the website. 
 
I imagine this isn't happening in Jamaica because it's expensive to host a website with this much activity --- streaming etc. But the newspaper model here is definitely changing toward being online-focused. There is talk that at least one daily newspaper will go online-only in the near future.
 
I'm interested to hear about how things go in Jamaica.