Leanpub sent email saying an updated version of Paul Bradshaw’s book Scraping for Journalists is available. The mail includes links to download the book in PDF, EPUB or Mobi formats – or perhaps all three , there’s no digital rights management to worry about.
Because the book is already purchased, updates are free.
Leanpub is a great way of selling ebooks: buy one, all future updates are free.
Royalties are generous for writers, around 90 per cent less a 50 cents per book fee.
Another great thing about Leanpub, is the books are reasonably priced. Scraping for Journalists doesn’t include as much
information as you might get from an everyday paperback, but the price is about half what you’d pay for a printed book. There’s also a money-back guarantee.
Oh, and it case you’re wondering the Scraping for Journalists book is good too.
This post was originally written in 2008, hence the mention of Blackberrys. It’s just as relevant in 2026.
Any fool can write a good press release that hits its target audience and creates an impact.
Writing one that fails means work. There are people who have mastered the art.
As an editor I’ve seen some great efforts over the years. I’d like to share them with you.
Here are my top ten tips for making sure press releases get minimum attention:
1. Cripple its chances of reaching editors and journalists
Everyone can read plain text messages in the body of an email. The message will almost certainly get through to any kind of desktop email clients, all flavours of web mail, as well as Blackberrys, iPhones and Palm Pilots.
To reach less than 100 per cent of your potential audience, try putting some of these clever barriers in the way.
Attachments are an effective way of cutting down the reach of your press release. People reading email on mobile devices have trouble reading them. Spam filters treat them with suspicion and if you’re lucky the recipient may use Lotus Notes or some other arcane technology as a client and have difficulty decoding the attachment.
Another advantage of attachments is that you can trim your audience further by using difficult-to-open file formats: such as the new .docx file format used by Word 2007 – many journalists will struggle to read them.
Attachments are also great for bulking up the size of your release so it won’t squeeze through email gateways. If you’re clever, use high-resolution logos in, say, your Word attachments. These add nothing to the press release but can swiftly push the file size over the email gateway threshold.
A further reason for sending a press release as an attachment is its invisibility to email search. So, when a journalist finally decides to look for your press release among the hundreds and thousands in their email in-box, it will be difficult to find.
2. Minimise relevance
One way to make sure your press release fails is to make sure it has no relevance to any sane audience. For example, if you are a technology company and you buy a new fleet of cars you can squander your PR budget and make sure any future release goes directly to an editor’s recycle bin by sending the story to the technology press.
3. Send your press release out whenever
Timeliness is everything. So send releases out when you feel like it to boost your chances of failure. Better still, for print publications try waiting until five minutes after the final deadline. For online publications, wait until the story has already broken elsewhere. Editors love that.
Good journalists are annoying creatures. Rather than printing your press release verbatim and passing the contact details over to their advertising departments, they may want to speak to the people mentioned in your releases.
A tried and tested technique for avoiding these complications is to send the people overseas shortly after dispatching the release. International communications are good these days, so just packing them off to a partner conference in Atlanta isn’t good enough, you need to make sure they are on an 18 hour trans-pacific flight or, better still, holidaying on a remote island.
5. Use poor writing skills
Obvious when you think about it. If your writing is poor and confused so that editors and journalists can’t understand your message you kill two birds with one stone.
First, you’ll make sure the first message gets spiked in the too hard basket.
Second, as a bonus, you can establish your reputation as an illiterate idiot that isn’t worth bothering with under any circumstances. That way, your future releases will go straight to the junk pile without even being read.
6. Try bullying
Sadly this powerful technique is underused. By threatening to talk to a journalist’s editor, or an editor’s boss about their poor response to your press release you can permanently undermine your relationship with scores of people (remember journalists talk to each other so this is an efficient way of burning lots of bridges).
Another approach is to tell the journalist the company in question is advertising in the publication thus triggering their professional editorial independence.
7. Don’t bother with press release photographs
Journalists and editors like photographs. They love good photographs. By making sure they are no photographs of any description you’ll increase the chances that your press release is regarded as useless.
If you think that’s taking things too far, try sending out crappy, unusable photos. Photos with dozens of un-named people work well in this respect. Getting people to hold champagne glasses, stand in front of company logos, gather around an unreadable normal-size bank cheque or impersonate public enemy number one mug shots are all effective techniques for creating instantly ignorable press release photographs.
8. Send it to everyone regardless
This is a great way to upset journalists and degrade both your personal and company reputation. At the same time if you work for a PR agency you can bill the client heaps for having a, er, comprehensive, mailing list and then bill them for time as you and your staff spend all day on the phone dealing with angry editors.
9. Keep your press release as dull as possible
Journalists prefer interesting stories. Public relations professionals recognise this and use clever tricks like passive sentences, boring ideas, irrelevant background facts, tired clichéd adjectives and implausible anodyne quotes to turn them off and help speed their press releases on their way to the great recycle bin in the sky.
Press releases use a surprising amount of predictable material.
In-house and government public relations people are usually better at delivering boring releases than agency staff – if you’re worried your writing sparkles too much, they have much to teach you.
10. Make sure the subject line obscures the message
Even experienced public relations operatives can slip up by giving an email release an interesting subject line. The danger is that after putting in all the hard work required to guarantee nobody takes the slightest notice of their press release they use active language to put a relevant, timely subject line message that tempts editors and journalists to open the document and read more.
The good news is there are fail-safe subject lines that are certain to turn off editors and journalists so they can just skip past your release. A classic subject line like press release will probably work, if that’s too simple try **important press release **or important press release from Company Name.
A neat by-product of badly written subject lines is they can fool spam detection engines into rejecting a message altogether; phrases like important announcement from Company Name or message for Clark Kent can come in handy here. Going straight to spam is the most efficient way of making sure your press release fails.
And whatever you do, don’t try to manipulate journalists with fake exclusives–that’s a guaranteed way to burn bridges permanently.
Bonus tip: Get email greetings wrong
Want to guarantee journalists ignore your follow-up emails? Start them with “Good morning” so your message looks thoughtless when it arrives at 3pm, or worse, when they read it at 11pm while catching up on email.
Use time-appropriate greetings if you want to look professional. Or don’t, if your goal is to signal that you haven’t thought about the person on the receiving end.
In Dealing with grumpy editors, Dan Kaufman writes about the exclusive press release:
I don’t understand why PRs give editors exclusives – because for the most part it does the PR and their client more harm than good.You see, if a story is newsworthy then it’ll run anyway – and if it isn’t then giving it as an exclusive isn’t going to make much difference.
Kaufman goes on to say if a PR person gives an editor a decent story as an exclusive, it will upset other editors. He says piss off, but this is a family website.
This happens all the time here in New Zealand. The practice is counter-productive.
It can certainly destroy trust a PR person or company has built.
Exclusive… oh yeah?
Waking-up, reading a so-called exclusive story then later in the day getting a press release covering the same ground happens too often in New Zealand.
Often this happens when a public relations person thinks they might get sympathetic or splashy coverage of their story if they play favourites.
PRs have approached me offering to trade an exclusive for a favourable position: often the cover of a print title. They may even ask to vet the copy in return for the story. This, in effect, can mean an editor enters into a conspiracy to mislead readers.
Many ‘exclusives’ are rubbish stories
Often stories ‘leaked’ this way are rubbish – they read more like advertising than news. Editors giving the press release an early run are manipulated into becoming part of a marketing exercise.
My response to this is to stop trusting the PR person behind the leak. This means they’ll have difficulty slipping any of their future propaganda past me. In extreme cases I’ve ignored any further communication from the source. And I’ve been known to make a formal complaint to the client. In one case I had to tell a PR’s other clients I could no longer work with their agent.
And anyway, if a company thinks it is that important to get their message in a publication they should look at advertising.
If journalists do respond to your press release, make sure you know how to handle their questions professionally:
How to deal with media questions.
Modern public relations people often don’t understand how the media works. Many don’t get journalism.
This wasn’t a problem in the past when most PR people were ex-journalists. Today, many publicists have never seen the inside of an editorial office.
Or if they have, they haven’t seen how editors and journalist work. They know little about what makes journalists tick. What motivates and drives reporters and editors.
Harmful PR failures
As a result many PR people end up harming their client’s chances of getting publicity. Or at least the right publicity. Instead they get in the way of journalists and annoy editors.
Which is where Dan Kaufman’s Dealing with grumpy editors gets its name. To public relations people journalists often appear grumpy, rude and obstructive.
This should not surprise anyone. You wouldn’t believe some of the nonsense editors have to put up with from PR people. Some of that nonsense passes for wisdom or craft in the PR industry.
Rubbish public relations
After 17 years before the editorial masthead Kaufman has seen some rubbish PR. He has also seen some sharp operators. In this book he provides practical advice for communications workers wanting to get an editor’s attention.
If you work in PR, you may not agree with everything Kaufman says. He tells it like it is in straightforward language. It is a valuable work, worth every cent of the ridiculously low $4.99 he is charging for the PDF version.
I can come to your offices – or meet you in a fancy restaurant – and give you the same advice for $150 an hour. So on second thoughts, don’t buy the book. Hire me instead.
Grumpy editors
In the spirit of good journalism, I should disclose my connection with Kaufman. I hired him as a junior journalist some 17 years or so ago. Hopefully he wasn’t thinking of me when he gave his book its title.