Reports of the Press Release's Death are Greatly Exaggerated

This is fascinating. I just saw today's This Week In Review, by the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard. (Warning: May prove addictive to media geeks.) It has a section about a debate concerning the death of two media forms: the RSS feed and the press release. I don't believe either are dead. I'm more interested in the press release though - I don't really care as much about the RSS feed. Mostly that's because as someone who looks for the RSS button whenever I find a new blog I should be reading, I think, whatever the flaws, it's here to stay. Dave Winer says the same here, and points out the one big flaw by comparison with Twitter (and one smaller one that's more of an annoyance than anything):

Succinctly put -- news is about what's new -- and that's it.

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Why does Twitter work better for news than Google Reader? Simple, Twitter gives you what's new now. You don't have to hunt around to find the newest stuff. And it doesn't waste your time by telling you how many unread items you have. Who cares. (It's like asking how many NYT articles you haven't read. It would be gargantuan.)

Anyway, I was more interested in the debate about the press release. On the "death" side, we have AdAge's Simon Dumenco:

Kanye's belated arrival on Twitter (with a Twitter Verified Account, launched in July) has had me thinking about how, increasingly, the news media has a nifty new way of "reporting" entertainment news: regurgitating celebrity tweets. It wasn't that long ago that a celebrity with something "important" to put out there, like an apology, would automatically say it through a tightly controlled protocol, like a set of engineered sound bites delivered via a well-staged interview. Now 140 characters or fewer suffices.

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As the celebrity-industrial complex goes, so goes the rest of corporate America. Consider, for instance, "How Steve Slater Is Stifling JetBlue's Social-Media Strategy," an August report by my colleagues Rupal Parekh and Michael Bush. The gist of it was that the world wasn't expecting the airline to address its little steward-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown problem via press release. We wanted JetBlue to chime in immediately on its @JetBlue Twitter feed and its Facebook page. Over the summer, BP dutifully issued press releases detailing its well-plugging and clean-up efforts, but it dropped the ball on Twitter, leaving an opening for the parodists of @BPGlobalPR to wreak havoc.

The long-suffering, much-maligned press release, I'd argue, finally died this summer, thanks particularly to JetBlue and BP, with a little moral support from Kanye West and just about every other celebrity with thumbs. (Of course, press releases will probably continue to stumble along, zombie-like, for years to come, because too many PR folks are still heavily invested in grinding them out.)

On the other side of the ring we have Jeremy Pepper and Kathy E. Gill. Pepper first says that the "press release is dead" chant is a tired meme, and then this, which I think is the crux of why Dumenco's wrong:

But, maybe, just maybe Twitter's limitation to 140 characters is just not enough to disseminate news, even with links to a blog or page that is, well, I guess it'd be a press release huh?

Griffin seems to agree, saying that press releases, taken together give the context and backstory of a company. She also makes these points:

I’d argue that celebrity “press releases” (publicity) are as different from business “press releases” as The National Inquirer is from The New York Times or People/Us magazines are from The Economist/The Atlantic.

I’d also argue that the “press release” blast—an untargeted communication not unlike the products of the mass media on the receiving end of those releases—began its decline with the popularization of the fax machine.

I think both of the dissenters here are right - there's a lot more information in a typical press release than 140 characters can convey. That's the entire reason PR firms exist, even in celebrity-land. Sometimes you want to provide more context, so you need an entire statement. For example, Tiger Woods did not blurt things out on Twitter when he had all his troubles earlier this year - he issued statements. And if we get further away from celebrities, as Griffin suggests, press releases convey much more context.

I think there are two further points to be made here. First, the only reason, in my mind, that tweets seem to have replaced press releases to an extent among our celebrities is that, since the advent of reality TV, we expect very little of our celebrities as far as distance (or frankly, maturity). So many new celebs have come about by behaving badly that we no longer fault them for tweeting something drunk, for example. We actually expect them to interact with us - we want to be part of their lives because we see them more as regular people than before. We also fault them less for transgressions, so there's less need to protect the image. I think between Twitter and reality TV, we recognize that celebs generally are human and have taken down the pedestals to a large degree. We've also lost the idea of a role model, but that's maybe a different discussion.

So that, to me, helps explain the celeb angle, but there's also similarity between press releases and tweets that's very general. A key component of press releases are often a pithy quote. I remember this discussion once where a place I worked needed a press release and the communications person had it ready almost instantly, yet people were going around for an hour figuring out the best quote. But wait! That's exactly what Twitter is in the PR game, right? Everyone wants to have that perfect quote on Twitter too, so they get retweeted everywhere. So, while I think Griffin is right is that press releases are still useful, not "zombies" as Dumenco put it, there might be times where, say the quote in the press release is all that gets noticed, making them functionally the same. For people not interested in more than fame, they really may not need the press release any more.