Why I’m sick of bad press releases from lazy PRs who have never read me or this newspaper
On 1 April, I published a column on the City A.M. website. Check it out: it’s a spoof of a press release. You may think it’s hyperbole. It isn’t. It’s the kind of effortful rubbish that I receive every day.
In the past, when some grotesquely bad press release hit my inbox, I would mock it on these pages.
Sometimes, I would come close to naming and shaming. I used to think that this would scare the author away – but no, they popped up again the following week. And then I got it: they didn’t read me. Because if they had, they would have known that I don’t review restaurants, dog shows, theme parks or porn films – the latter, even if they are director’s cut.
This fact fills me with resentment. How can you neglect the basics of your profession? How can you not read the newspapers to which you send your press releases?
Have some respect for your job. Have some respect for yourself.
Then there are artificial news hooks: the strained, laboured connections that people make up because they think they create a “story”.
An HR consultancy finds out that there exists an International Day of Happiness. They write a press release which says that the UK is doing really badly on the happiness front, lagging in happiness rankings behind every other country, including the war zones. But there is a solution: the HR consultancy has just created a so-called people development product that would effortlessly make us a happy nation again.
Or someone writes a book with two sisters as protagonists. His publicist finds out that, apparently, there is a National Siblings Day. The publicist sends me an email. As the country rejoices in celebrating National Siblings Day, she writes, as strangers embrace in the streets and people dance on park lawns, the new book captures perfectly the spirit of this glorious occasion.
Are you not a bit embarrassed? And, by the way, had you simply said that a new book came out, and that it had some literary merit, you would have achieved a better result.
There is an even bigger crime: those pitches that are obviously, blatantly biased, but which camouflage as objective facts. A company conducted “research” and found that 23 per cent of graduates reject job offers because they don’t like the office furniture.
Please tell it to the tri-lingual, Stanford-educated young friend of mine, who would kill for a job at a decent company and an opportunity to learn from intelligent people. And she would happily sit in the corridor, or a stationary cupboard, or a balcony.
I guess you can argue that my sample is small, whereas this company conducted “research”. But guess what line of business this company is in? Office furniture design.
And finally, do you like writing? Because a lot of the time, I have the impression that you don’t, and that your press releases are a collage of bits and bobs nicked from the internet – and that they make as little sense to you as they do to me.
So, again, do you like writing? Because if you enjoy having your way with words, if you can form ideas that are original, then clear, elegant writing is the greatest joy of all.
And we will all clamber to publish your press releases, too.
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