5 - Midsection, Conclusion, Quotations
The News Release is a technical document designed (ideally) with one aim in mind – to lure, hook and maintain the interest of a journalist wishing to write the story that it promotes. If you have ever spun for mackerel you know the technique.
A good release has an eye-catching but attractive headline that hooks the reader by making it stand out against the rest. It should offer the prospect of timeliness (there should be a news peg, tying the story to an event of some sort. Stories out of the blue with no particular time reference are useless for news). Remember, News is about what’s happening – best of all, it’s about what is about to happen.
The release should also seek to make the journalist’s life as easy as possible by offering quotes from the main players. These should be short and pithy, and that is always the main problem. In radio, short pithy quotes came to be known as “soundbites”. Although often derided as now forming part of the armoury of the hated “spindoctors” who collaborate in creating the “barrier to understanding” said by a few intellectuals to be endemic in media presentation, a good soundbite, cleverly encapsulating complex ideas in a few words, is almost as rare as good poetry – and for the same reason. Both take either a rare extreme of talent, or you have to be very lucky indeed.
Written quotes from bigwigs tend to be long, dull and full of caveats. These should either be edited to make them acceptable, or not used. Sensible bigwigs will allow someone who knows what they are doing to create quotes for them. (However, said bigwig should of course, always pass these before they are promulgated!) A journalist will always attempt (time permitting) to get his or her own quotes from the main players – see “Notes for Editors and further information”, Lesson 6.
Make no mistake – you cannot control what a journalist will make of your story by putting all the caveats that surround your conclusions into your quote. The quote will simply not be used, and might jeopardise the entire effort to get coverage. By all means attempt to add complexity after you have secured a telephone interview with whoever is writing your story. However, the structure of journalism and its institutional methods means that qualifying information and complexity will be placed lower down in the copy that is eventually filed by the journalist to the desk.
Despite the fact that the story will have been written “to length”, sub editors may then be faced with making the story fit the space available, a factor that will change as the day proceeds. It changes because (for example) other stories break, or advertising comes in (adverts always take priority over copy). The subs will then cut the story from the bottom. So there is good reason why inessential information is left out until later.
Often of course your story may not make the paper at all, in which case it is said to have been “spiked”. Do not complain to the journalist about this – spiked stories are a fact of life. Newspapers are a bit like nature – wasteful. Also, do not complain to journalists about headlines. These are the responsibility of sub editors and there is never any redress against sub editors.
A good release has an eye-catching but attractive headline that hooks the reader by making it stand out against the rest. It should offer the prospect of timeliness (there should be a news peg, tying the story to an event of some sort. Stories out of the blue with no particular time reference are useless for news). Remember, News is about what’s happening – best of all, it’s about what is about to happen.
The release should also seek to make the journalist’s life as easy as possible by offering quotes from the main players. These should be short and pithy, and that is always the main problem. In radio, short pithy quotes came to be known as “soundbites”. Although often derided as now forming part of the armoury of the hated “spindoctors” who collaborate in creating the “barrier to understanding” said by a few intellectuals to be endemic in media presentation, a good soundbite, cleverly encapsulating complex ideas in a few words, is almost as rare as good poetry – and for the same reason. Both take either a rare extreme of talent, or you have to be very lucky indeed.
Written quotes from bigwigs tend to be long, dull and full of caveats. These should either be edited to make them acceptable, or not used. Sensible bigwigs will allow someone who knows what they are doing to create quotes for them. (However, said bigwig should of course, always pass these before they are promulgated!) A journalist will always attempt (time permitting) to get his or her own quotes from the main players – see “Notes for Editors and further information”, Lesson 6.
Make no mistake – you cannot control what a journalist will make of your story by putting all the caveats that surround your conclusions into your quote. The quote will simply not be used, and might jeopardise the entire effort to get coverage. By all means attempt to add complexity after you have secured a telephone interview with whoever is writing your story. However, the structure of journalism and its institutional methods means that qualifying information and complexity will be placed lower down in the copy that is eventually filed by the journalist to the desk.
Despite the fact that the story will have been written “to length”, sub editors may then be faced with making the story fit the space available, a factor that will change as the day proceeds. It changes because (for example) other stories break, or advertising comes in (adverts always take priority over copy). The subs will then cut the story from the bottom. So there is good reason why inessential information is left out until later.
Often of course your story may not make the paper at all, in which case it is said to have been “spiked”. Do not complain to the journalist about this – spiked stories are a fact of life. Newspapers are a bit like nature – wasteful. Also, do not complain to journalists about headlines. These are the responsibility of sub editors and there is never any redress against sub editors.