Why PR pros should ditch newswires
This communicator says the oft-employed media relations tactic isn’t up to snuff, advising that you should spend your time and money on other efforts. Do you agree?
Not long ago, I worked for a large multinational with a one-person public relations team (me).
Given that we wanted to garner global coverage in multiple languages, I had the support of a well-known and well-regarded international PR agency. (Grab a coffee, and prepare for a rant.)
Getting a press release ready to go out was a mission: I’d brief the agency, they would draft the press release, I’d edit it, they’d send another draft, and I’d edit it again. Then it would go through an arduous approvals process involving the stakeholders, the legal team and senior managers, each with their own thoughts marked in the tracked changes.
After weeks—or, in some cases, months—we’d get the go-ahead to release the news. The agency, a global leader in the industry, was responsible for distributing the news to media outlets, and their approach was to simply fire it up on the newswire and see what happened.
With newswires, what’s the return on Investment?
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