Don’t hit send! Check these before you make a media release blunder.

You’ve written your release - it’s sounding great, and you’ve triple checked for expression, punctuation and spelling. You’re ready to hit send, right?

Wrong. You could still be making the following mistakes:

You don’t really need a media release

Gone are the days where you could send out a media release and be guaranteed a few media hits. In fact, you may be better off getting your news out there without a media release at all.

The media releases of yore are ideally suited to the genuinely newsworthy for a broad audience type story. If you’re story is a little more niche, a tailored pitch to your targeted media will be far more effective.

You don’t get to the point fast enough

I have read a mountain of media releases written by PR professionals who don’t get to the point until halfway down the page. If I were a journalist, they would have already lost me.

You may love the topic of your release so much that you start crafting a delicious story, but taking too long to get to the point completely misses the mark – and your beautiful writing is wasted.

If you don’t tell the whole story in the headline and first paragraph then you need a rewrite.

You’re not speaking to your audience

Sometimes a media release is needed to reach a broad audience. But the angles of interest are going to be different for certain audience segments.

Have you written a tailored release for the local media; trade media; general/consumer media? Consider that you may need to.

Get these three things right as well as the basics, and you will be on your way to preventing a media release blunder.