News releases in 2019: too often turgid, fuzzy, and sexist
When I was younger, so much younger than today, one of the very first news releases I wrote caught the attention of the acerbic and thirsty Daily Mail firebrand, Keith Waterhouse. And not in a good way. At the time, Waterhouse had a column in the comms industry bible PR Week. Hell, it was so long ago (1990) that PR Week actually came out, erm, weekly.
Waterhouse had been asked by his Haymarket paymasters to review the forest of news releases that arrived by the sackful at their Hammersmith offices. And at the offices of every print and broadcast media outlet. A phenomenal waste of human endeavour and paper, news release - then often press release - writing was a cause of serious environmental concern.
My news release detailed an offer that no self-respecting tech journalist should have been able to refuse. On behalf of the first agency I ever worked for (PR with Clout, a pun on the owner's surname AND the supposed impact of her merry PR ingenues), I gave the world the Clout PR / Which Computer? PC Express. You'll have read about it in Waterhouse's memoirs, no doubt. He wouldn't stop banging on about it in every interview and column between his first reading it and his death almost 20 years later. Not.
Waterhouse's article was headlined "Journey to the bottom of my bin". My feeble, college newsletter prose caricatured PC journalists as lazy, disorganised, barely-functioning alcoholics. "You know what it's like. You wake up with your mouth feeling like the inside of an orangutang's jockstrap ..." it started, tastefully enough. The hapless hack knew he had to get from London to the Birmingham NEC to cover the Which Computer? show, but he'd left it too late and all the trains to Rummidge were booked (unlikely).
Step in enterprising, forward-thinking Clout PR who - on behalf of its clients - had hired a whole carriage in which to take the good scribes of Microscope, PC Dealer, and Value-Added Reseller to the show. Hell, we'd even take fanzine editors from The Peter Norton User Group (PNUG) Newsletter. Was there no end to our ingenuity and generosity?
I remember that news release well. First, because when I wrote it I was proud of the puns and the free rein I was given to truly express myself. Second, because my boss loved it. But third, only until Waterhouse excoriated it in PR Week, at which point she declared it the world's worst news release. For a few months, I think it was even framed and hung in shame in the West London mews house that was our office. Perhaps it was pinned on the pin board, cheek-by-jowl with Waterhouse's critique, a fair and just warning that this was not the quality of work expected in this fine institution. I think it was still there when I slunk off to my next job a few months later.
I also remember it because, when we were packing press packs for the trade show, it was on this one that I got a nasty paper cut and bled profusely over all of the folders, 50 of which we had to bin and start printing all over again. I didn't so much cut my teeth in tech PR, as cut my fingers. I remember leaving the office after 1am that day.
The passage of almost 30 years and some expensive therapy have blotted the actual train journeys out of my memory. But I suspect there were about half-a-dozen hacks - all smoking - and the same number of resting actor friends called up at the last moment to fill the space and make the day out look more successful to clients travelling with us. And justify our fees.
What I can't forget is the hideous prose I wrote so early in my career, how it was singled out for humiliation by Waterhouse, and how I vowed to learn from this early moment in the spotlight. Ever since - and I very rarely write the things these days - I've been very interested to see how others craft news releases.
This week is National Storytelling Week, the Society for Storytelling’s annual jamboree of all things story. And as for each of the last four years, my corporate and brand storytelling consultancy Insight Agents is marking the week by publishing some new research. And in our line of fire this year is the humble – yet often overblown – news release, still the staple of corporate and brand storytelling.
What we’ve found - despite Waterhouse's wise words in 1990 - is this: Britain’s biggest companies write news releases that are woolly, opaque, and routinely fail to communicate clearly. They’re often too long, with sentences so protracted that they defy understanding. And men outnumber women almost nine to one as spokespeople. Yes, you read me right. Almost nine to one. It's as if #seeher has escaped the notice of corporate communications and PR agencies, despite the gender balance in these functions.
Our research has analysed the linguistic content of news releases from the top 50 firms on the Financial Times share index. We’re publishing these findings during National Storytelling Week as the second annual FTSE50 Clarity Index. You can download the report here.
We asked our research collaborators from the Catalyst Scheme at Sussex University’s Innovation Centre to harvest the ten most recent news releases from the 50 biggest companies of the FTSE, posted online to mid-November 2018. They then analysed how simple or complex the releases were to read. They used the well-established Flesch Kincaid (FK) reading ease tool, via Readable. The analysis enabled our researchers to re-rank the FTSE50 by linguistic clarity. The top ten is shown in the table below.
Top ten clearest communicators on the FTSE50 for linguistic clarity of news releases
Financial services firm Hargreaves Lansdown was the clearest communicator on the FTSE50, one of three companies from the sector in the top ten (also Aviva and Barclays). It’s another good year for Aviva (4th), which topped the inaugural FTSE50 Clarity Index in 2018 (turn back the clock to last year’s blog here). None of Britain’s ten biggest companies featured in the FTSE Clarity Index 2019, with the two biggest – Royal Dutch Shell (￡203bn market capitalisation) and HSBC (￡130bn) – ranked 16th and 19th respectively.
The three media and publishing companies on the FTSE50 don’t win any awards for clarity or ease of understanding. Publishers RELX Group (which now dubs itself an “information and analytics company”) and Informa ranked 27 and 45 respectively. Meanwhile, WPP Group – the holding company for world’s largest collection of advertising and PR firms – came in at 43, four places below its rank by market capitalisation. There’s clearly still a lot of work to do for new CEO, Mark Read, if he’s to get his message across clearly following Martin Sorrell’s departure last year.
The gender imbalance of spokespeople quoted in the news releases of Britain’s biggest businesses is stark. On average, almost nine out of ten news releases quoted male spokespeople. 21 companies quoted only men, and a further 14 quoted just one woman. Prudential was the only company on the index approaching parity, with six men and four women quoted in the ten news releases analysed. This contrasts with the FAANG Five – Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. Google and Facebook featured equal numbers of female and male spokespeople.
Even in the digital media age, the news release remains an important tool for corporate communication. It’s also one over which companies have total control, unlike a lot of social media content. That’s why it's embarrassing that so many of Britain’s biggest business do it so badly. Writing good news releases is fundamentally an exercise in empathy. It’s about putting yourself in the mind of those who will read the news release – journalists, bloggers, anyone outside the organisation. This is true of all business writing, but particularly news releases.
And while there are some shining stars of clear corporate communication, I have no doubt that our analysis is enough to have Keith Waterhouse spinning in his grave.