Writing News: A Public Relations Campaign Strategy Tip

As a former journalist turned public relations campaign strategist, I tell clients media professionals want news. It’s plain and simple. I tell them the news they send journalists can be a direct correlation to the media they earn. And the coverage they earn, directly impacts the success or failure of their PR campaign. In a recent post, “A PR Campaign Strategy Gives Your Business the Traction It Needs,” I noted that a well executed PR strategy can be the best investment you make. But it can be the worse investment to make if you write promotional bullshit journalists hate.

Simply, journalists love stories. And when you give them stories that entertain, inform, and edify their audience, the likelihood of getting published increases. There are two direct benefits to this approach:

• The relationship with journalists you work with strengthens. They like you because you’re and informational source. And you like them because you earning more ink.
• Your clients and prospects see you and as more credible. Your though leadership strengthens, as does your brand.

Many people, even some public relations professionals, don’t know how to write news. News writing, after all, is a style not taught in college courses unless someone finds their passion in journalism. Writing news is a style of organizing information different from technical writing, proposal writing, and other forms of business communication.

To write news, you have to begin by writing better. Here’s one tip to improve your news writing:

Wasted Words, Wasted Space

No two writing professionals impacted the craft more than William Strunk and E. B. White on brevity. In The Elements of Style, they write …

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should contain no necessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that a writer makes all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subject only in outline, but that every word tell.

Strategy: What writing pros call surface trimming is one simple way to improve your news writing. Phrases, such as, in the event of, can be replaced with if, and despite the fact that, is easily reduced to in spite of. These are just two examples of surface trimming.

Next week, we will look at how nouns can abstract and cloud the meaning of what we want to convey.

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