A press release telling about “Stevie, the Water-Skiing Squirrel” will never get that talented mammal on the TV news.
But that same press release, accompanied by video of Stevie jumping over mini-ramps in an inflatable pool, will make the news 99 days out of 100.
When I search Google News for “surveys,” I get nearly 50,000 results. When I search for “stocks,” I get about 54,000. The media love polls and surveys.
Here are just a few headlines in the news as I write this, generated directly from surveys:
You thought of it, you researched it, you wrote it. So you own your story. At least you do until you send it to the media.
At that point, they are free to do whatever they want with the information you gave them.
Press releases are a useful tool for announcing news and for keeping your name in the mind of the news media.
But you can’t build a successful publicity campaign on press releases alone, for the simple reason that very few press releases ever make it into the paper.
We’d all like reporters to ask us about our career successes and personal triumphs—heck, we’d all like anyone to ask us about those. But reporters must look out for their clients, the reading public. Think about it from your own perspective as an investor—when you read a story about a company, you want to know that the reporter has asked difficult questions, not just relied on the PR hype.