Unjournalism

Why does a news release need a new name?

Posted on January 29th, 2007 by Mike Keliher
Shortened permalink:

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Several folks in the public relations industry are working to make the grand-daddy of all tried-and-true PR tools — the news release — more relevant and useful in this crazy new world of blogs and Web journalism and “we don’t want no more of your corporate BS marketing junk.” I’ll spare you the details and simply point you to some the fruits of their important, difficult work at socialmediarelease.org.

Several of the folks close to this issue have formed a “working group” that focuses on hammering out issues related to the revamping of the news release. They post occasional podcasts to report on what they’re up to; NMRcast, they call it, with NMR being “new media release.”

In the most recent installment of said podcast, Tom Foremski, the guy who’s basically responsible for starting this whole discussion with this post, eventually brings the discussion around to the name “social media release.” At about eight minutes into the podcast, Tom says something to this effect:

Maybe it should be called a “media release” or something like that because there are so many constituencies to serve.

He’s hesitant to call it a social media release because the content is for more than just perveyors of social media like bloggers and podcasters. So what do you call a document that is designed to officially release important information — often news — to various groups with different interests or reasons for caring about that information?

Call me a visionary, but here’s my suggestion: How about calling it a damn “news release”?

I don’t intend to stomp on the folks who are leading this discussion around bringing this PR tool into the brave new world of blogs and the like, but this strikes me as a textbook example of thinking too hard. You’re conveying news — “releasing” the information, if you will. What’s wrong with “news release”? You’re not playing favorites by calling it “press release” (old school!) or “social media release.”

You could call it a “new media release” — which many people use interchangeably with “social media release” — but that’s, at least in name, bypassing consumers or anyone who’s not “media.” And as many people now recognize, news releases on the Web are increasingly a direct-to-consumer source of information, no longer requiring a reporter to take interest in a news release and putting that news in the paper or on TV.

Keep up the great work, NMRcasters. But don’t get hung up on the name. That’s not what needs to change. Trash like this news release is what needs to be done away with.