Should We Write With The Headline In Mind?

Mobius Industries' Head of Press, Emma Berge, explores writing a press release following Muck Rack publishing their ‘The State of Journalism' results last week. Are we now in an age where fast-paced news seems to be demanding quantity over quality journalism?.

Emma Berge (she/her) joined Mobius in 2011 and now heads up the PR department, working on campaigns with companies such as Park Theatre, New Perspectives, The Place and Korean Cultural Centre UK. As well as working on shows, she has delivered PR workshops and seminars for companies including Clore Leadership, China Plate, Stage One and Perform Czech. 

Recently, I was in Wolverhampton on invitation from China Plate to deliver a talk on PR to a group on Wolverhampton Art Centre’s Producer Training Programme. What’s often interesting about the Q&As at these seminars is that the questions are coming from people with very little exposure to my world of press and PR, so sometimes I have to go right back to basics and remember why I do things the way I do them rather than just ‘that’s how I’ve always done it’. Usually I’ve ‘always done it’ that way for a reason, but I’ve been doing this for so long now (14 years, gulp!) that I sometimes forget why.

However, on this occasion the question from the floor that threw me a bit came from someone with experience of working with press. It was ‘do you write press releases how you want them printed given that a lot of publications these days copy and paste from the press release?’. My gut instinct was no. The press release’s purpose is to show the journalist the potential for writing about the subject, not to tell them what to write. But there is a point there, a lot of writers do copy and paste from the release, am I writing my releases in an old fashioned way, from a time when the media landscape that was less digital and where journalists had more time? I gave the answer: more with news releases, because they’re factual and delivering news, but you shouldn’t write it how you want a feature to appear. It was an ok answer, but it niggled at me.

Last week Muck Rack’s ‘The State of Journalism’ survey results were published (very much like our State of Arts PR survey, but from the other side). The journalists are American, so not entirely the same landscape, but a lot of the same rules apply. Biggest threats? Disinformation. Do you use ChatGPT? 42% yes. Then an interesting one: Which social media is most valuable to you as a journalist? X (Twitter) is down to 21% after being at 35% last year. The highest is now Facebook (27%) with LinkedIn doing much better than I’d anticipated (18%).

And the nugget that I needed: what immediately causes you to disregard or delete a PR pitch? Top answer: it’s irrelevant to my coverage. Excellent, a point I’d made to my emerging producers, you can’t ask people to cover something that’s not relevant to them. Next answer, 71%: it’s overly promotional or advertorial.

That was the answer I needed. We can put the words we want to see them printed – but within reason. We still can’t use the words unique or groundbreaking (and this isn’t just our industry, I’ve been to a seminar from outside of the arts world and told only to use groundbreaking if there’s a spade involved). We can’t put all our evocative marketing copy into our press releases if we want the copy to be used. Yes, journalists do lift from the press releases. But that’s because we put the press releases in their language.

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