communications

Who Wrote That News Story?

A few days ago, a friend of mine mentioned that a news release she had written and issued to the media was re-posted on a news website by a journalist verbatim, without credit to my friend or her organization for writing the release, as if it were a story that person had written. My friend wasn't happy with it, and seemed to suggest that it was laziness on the part of the journalist. My response?

We spend hours drafting news releases, making sure that key messages and all the right information is in there. This is to make sure that a journalist has all the info they need to write their story.

When a journalist does report on a story, and gets the facts wrong, we'll throw up our hands and say, "Oh, they just didn't get what I was trying to say! If only they'd read the briefing material or news release more closely!"

So to my friend who had her news release reprinted: I think this is the best possible situation. Your client's news got into the media without any distortion. Your news release was written well enough that he didn't find a need to rewrite it, and that was probably one of the reasons it got published. If the journalist had needed to rewrite it, he might not have had the time and it might not have gotten published.

Being a communicator is a job without a lot of glory. When things go well (as in this case), no one really notices. If you want to get your name out there, become an author or a journalist. Communicators work in the background.

What do you think, readers? Have you ever had someone publish a news release that you've written without credit to you? How do you feel about the fact that this is happening?

-Parker

PS: When I wrote this post, I purposely didn't read the post that my aforementioned friend, Bonnie Dean, wrote about it. I'm going to go read it now to get her perspective, and you should too: You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth.

CNW Goes Big On Twitter

CNW Group has always been committed to getting our clients' news in front of journalists and the media. For years, the only way to really do this was via the news wire. When fax machines became an accepted way to send and receive news and information, CNW Group embraced that technology to reach members of the media. Similarly, when email became a popular form of communication, CNW offered interested parties the ability to subscribe to our clients' news via portfolio email. The same, too with our categorized RSS feeds. The point is that as technology has changed, CNW Group has changed with it in order to make it as easy as possible for both members of the media and the general public to get news and information from our clients.

That's why I'm excited to announce that we've officially launched hundreds of unique Twitter accountsto distribute our clients' news over Twitter. The accounts are based on our existing news categories, and all releases posted on our website and over the wire will also go out on anywhere from one to four of these accounts (depending on how the release is categorized).

By breaking the news into these seperate categories, we're making it easy for interested parties, be they members of the media or the general public, to find and follow the type of news they are interested in. Similarly, by offering news via the traditional wire, by fax, by email, by RSS and now by Twitter we are making it as easy as possible for people to get news from us.

Read the official news release from CNW Group about this, or check out the full list of accounts at http://newswire.ca/GetNews.

-Parker

(note: Although I am an employee of CNW Group this post, like all my posts on BlogCampaigning, reflects only my own personal views and opinions and not those of my employer)