Bad writing isn’t just for PR people
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The Web is full of perfectly justfied rants about the sub-par quality of much of the writing done by PR people, particularly in news releases. A popular target — for good reason — are those executive quotes that were probably never uttered by an executive in the first place.
Example:
“We’re excited to partner with These Folks,” said Jane Doe, CEO of Boring Corp. “This synergy will allow us to leverage our extensive resources in generating industry-leading levels of boredom among our key constituencies.”
But excuse me for a minute while I unnecessarily pick on a big dog. Mike Arrington welcomes a new member (with an impressive resume) to his team and kicks the post off with a nice little bit of PR-ish BS.
We’ve charged her with leveraging our brand, syndicating our content and helping us drive revenue.
Sweet! I guess it’s not really all that bad, but any time I see the word “leveraging,” I vomit a little in my mouth, and the phrase “leveraging our brand” is like vomit times three.
And when Mike mentioned the new hire on Twitter, his message was reminiscent of those generic executive quotes:
I am so excited about Sarah Ross joining our team
I suppose I’m being overly critical and picking a fight where one is certainly not needed. I just found it funny that even the biggest and best of the new-media entities falls back to some seriously old-school PR-isms every once in a while.
(Don’t take this criticism to heavily. I really enjoy Mike’s work, and god knows TechCrunch is a successful blog, to put it mildly.)
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I wonder if there is an alternative. Something like this.
Hey, we had a ton of applicants for this job, but Sarah fills a gap that is our weak spot right now. Her work with xyz company impresses us and we hope she can replicate it here.
While people talk about us in early adopter circles, we need more eyeballs to get more revenue and we need more revenue to pay for new people.
It’s a crazy circle, but I’m in it now so we have to do this. We are trying to get into the healthcare market so if you think this is a good fit ,I bet Sarah can help us reach an agreement, you can find her on Twitter.
I hate it when you get that little regurgitation, works for baby birds, but not much elese.
Hmmm. Is the news release really all that important anymore? Or, can you have a real conversation about the value Sarah adds to the team by posting something about it in the corporate blog about why it’s so cool that Sarah is joining the company. Then, if you want media outreach, drive the press to that blog.
I suspect they are as sick of reading news releases as I am of editing them. There’s got to be a better way!
One rule that won’t change: It’s about the content.
If I have something to say, something that many people will actually care about or find interesting, it won’t matter much if I say it in a blog post or something that looks like a newswire article (which we call a news release) or a video on the company YouTube account. If it makes an impact, people will talk about it.
And for what it’s worth, Melissa, this sub-par writing I’m poking fun at here wasn’t in a news release. It was in a blog post at TechCrunch. It just *sounds like* bland news release writing.