{"id":514,"date":"2008-06-09T21:27:33","date_gmt":"2008-06-10T01:27:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/getgood.com\/roadmaps\/?p=514"},"modified":"2008-06-09T21:27:33","modified_gmt":"2008-06-10T01:27:33","slug":"the-proper-role-of-the-news-release","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/getgood.com\/roadmaps\/2008\/06\/09\/the-proper-role-of-the-news-release\/","title":{"rendered":"The proper role of the news release"},"content":{"rendered":"

My recent post about the direction this blog was heading<\/a> led some folks to think that I didn’t see any value in press releases. Nothing could be further from the truth. The press release, or more properly, the news release, has a very important communications job, whether it’s the old form or the fancy social media form with links and video. Quite simply, it conveys news to the media in an understood format. Or at least that’s what it should be doing.<\/p>\n

The news release is not and never has been the optimum form for communicating that same company news to our customers. There have always been much better alternatives – face to face, telephone, direct mail, annual reports, email, newsletters and now blogs — for speaking directly with our customers.<\/p>\n

The rise of the search engines in the 90s, however, led to a bizarre and mistaken transformation of the news release, in its natural and somewhat inaccessible form, into sales collateral. The story went something like this:<\/p>\n