When You Pitch the Media, It's Not About You

If I could wave a magic wand and change one thing about PR, it would be this: to make all press releases and PR pronouncements about the interests of readers, users and editors, not about the organization issuing the press release.

Think about it: aside from pronouncements from the White House, how often are news stories just verbatim press releases from an organization? Virtually never, right? Instead, all news stories are broad stories about a particular situation, with many elements, possibly including you, your boss or your organization.

Yet to this day, the vast majority of press releases are written in that stilted, third-person style ("So-and-so announced today") as if we were contributing an article to an imaginary media outlet.

Why, just today, I surfed over to PitchEngine.com to check it out -- this is a site that intends to help PR people shift from issuing stilted old media-style press releases to new style press releases that are supposedly more user-friendly for the social media environment. But they don't apparently have editors stopping users from taking their old third-person perspective and jamming it into the SMR format.

A couple of today's PitchEngine headlines, plucked fresh from the site:

• THE WILMA THEATER Announces Becky Shaw by Gina Gionfriddo as the final selection for its 2009-2010 Season


• Paws Unlimited Foundation Holds their Open House to Raise Awareness and Funding for their No-Kill, Ten-Acre Animal Shelter in the Greater New York Region

Do you care? Why should you?

But, there was a ray of light in this headline:

• Revenue Sharing Cuts from Governor, Legislature to Trigger More Crime, Layoffs Statewide

It's about Michigan (should have been in the headline) and was posted by the Michigan Municipal League. But at least it's about other people and not about them!