Directors Notes: 199 - Guidelines for Retrieval (Patreon)

My least favorite writing assignment is the press release. I got a degree in journalism, and one of my classes was in public relations. We had to write press releases. It's a simple enough task: generate excitement but with clarity at the top, give specific details below. Include contact information and availability of your subject or event. Try to get it all onto one page.

But one of the hard parts about press release-writing, for me anyway, was distilling down the core idea of the subject to be marketed. Why should anyone care? And how do you make them care with so few words, especially if it's just a cold pitch sent through mail, fax or email?

I want more latitude to express my excitement for something. I'd like to get to know you first, see if this is something you're really interested in, something you can really use. Maybe this widget isn't right for your life, and that's fine. I definitely don't want you to buy something you neither want nor need. And to assess your interest, I need more that just a bold, centered headline. 

Maybe we can meet for coffee, talk about things, get to know each other. It's not a date, and we don't have to be friends, but in order for me to know how to tell you about my product or event, I'd like to understand my audience. 

Selling myself is hard enough, let alone pitching an idea that's many steps removed from me. When I was in college, I was pretty good at selling clothes at J. Riggins in Post Oak Mall in College Station, Texas. I was terrible at writing press releases for the Opera and Performing Arts Society, though.

In this Night Vale episode, Brie Williams struck a nerve with me, with her long press release from the Department of Sanitation. Their long, rambling, introspective press release to the radio station is the kind of document I would prefer to write when I have something to sell via written word. I'd like people to know I'm bad at this, mostly because I'm uncomfortable with this, and to please just understand who I am in order to better understand the service I am hocking. 

The only real touch Joseph and I added to this episode was Cecil's classic Bad Journalism Take that the only way to handle press releases as a reporter is to read them verbatim, to replace your scheduled story queue with this pre-packaged news item, unaltered and unexamined. 

I'd like to think that Cecil is just being ridiculous, but honestly, I think he's acting pretty normally for a 21st Century journalist. 

Or maybe he truly understood the press release's author, he empathized with their struggles to write this monstrous missive, and allowed them the latitude I wish I had when tasked with the same responsibility. 

Jeffrey Cranor
December 1, 2021