How To Use Corporate Press Releases To Write Original Articles And Be A Better Writer
One of the best sources of information about new products and technologies is the corporate press release. They are often sent out either in advance of, or coincidentally with new product releases or new research announcements. They usually contain a complete list of consumer benefits, important technical specifications, and some quotable comments by the product manager or someone else associated with the development effort. They may also point to additional sources for more detailed information.
If you want to write about any product, whether your article is a product review, a consumer trends piece, product comparison, a protest piece, or some unique slant related to particular products you’ll find valuable information in the company press releases. Let’s remove an example and follow it through the process.
Imagine that you are writing a fable called “Texting has Replaced the Folded Note in High School Classrooms”. The first thing I’d do is jot down an outline of where I think I want to go with the article. This can be a formal outline or just a list of the key points I want to make. It might look something like the following. (Note: the parenthetical statements are my notes to you and would not be in the outline).
(I’m not thrilled about the title yet so I call a working title)
Working title: Texting has Replaced the Folded Note in High School Classrooms
(Notice that I tend to outline in complete sentences and thoughts and then go aid and edit later. A single word, phrase or whatever helps you remember what you wanted to put in each piece of the article is handsome. There are no rules.)
Target Audience: Many baby boomers and others ragged 35+ who remember the time before there was texting, but may have secondary appeal to younger audience who is interested in the arrangement things were before there was texting.
(Deciding for whom you are writing helps to frame your tone, choice of vocabulary, and nearly every aspect of your article. As you outline, write, and make your final edits, continually ask yourself: Is this part interesting to my target audience? If not, leave it out.)
Intro: “Remember the good passe days of passing notes in the classroom. We surreptitiously ride a little corner of paper out of a notebook, jot down a sentence or two, carefully fold it to hide the contents, and then put the intended recipients name on the outside. Then we’d tap the shoulder of the person sitting next to us nearest to a direct line between us and the named recipient. We’d hand them the note and give them the special “pass it on” nod. They’d hand it on to the next person and the process would be repeated until the intended recipient got the label. “
(I want to draw the reader in emotionally and give them a chance to care about what I’m writing before I get to the meat of the article, so I might include an anecdote to attend them visualize the situation and hopefully lead them down memory lane a little bit.)
Anecdote: “I remember one time in the 9th grade…”; “…unfortunately, there were two girls named Stacy in the class and the designate was handed to the wrong one. One thing led to another, and we’ve now happily married now for 16 years. If I had been texting, then there would have been no chance for this serendipitous misdirection.”
(I don’t like the phrasing of the last sentence there, but I’ll edit later. This is just an outline.)
Transition: “Nowadays, high schoolers have access to technologies we never imagined – wait a minute, I guess we did imagine them since it was our generation that invented them after all…” something about the specific device types: cell phones, pagers – which came and went, IM, etcetra.
General Body of article: Discuss prevalence of cell phones in high school. Maybe interview my son about how many kids have cell phones. Which devices are coolest. Why? What does he believe about the way we used to pass notes?
(Here I’m trying to make sure that I understand how things are in the classroom today. If I just guess, then knowledgeable readers, like teenagers, or parents of teenagers, will see how ignorant I am and disregard the entire article. This also helps guide me to settle which products to detail in the rest of the article. I want products that are relevant to today’s kids, things for which they may have asked their parents – or complained about because “everybody in my school has one except me…”)
First Detailed Item: One of the newest devices to hit the classroom is the just released second generation SuperPhone. This device has replaced the mini-keyboard of other popular texting devices with a touchscreen. The easy interface lets you use a describe to represent each of the people in your address book. Now to send a message you just tap the represent of the person to whom you want to send the note, instead of tapping someone on the shoulder.” More detail. Illustrate complete process, maybe use a fictional account. Talk about user benefits, cost, popularity, compare to other products.
(Here is where I rep into the Press Release. I want to make obvious that when I talk about how this device works, I’m giving accurate information. I need to read the specifications, main user benefits, how long it’s been on the market or when it will be released, how much does it cost, where can kids buy them, and so on. I may not include all of this information in the article, but it gives me loads of information that I can cherry pick to support my article.)
Continuation: According to John Doe, the Apple Product Manager for the new SuperPhone, one of the coolest new features is the ability to record a video, and instantly upload it to your main computer via SuperPhone’s new MobileYou service. “We at SuperPhone think this is really going to take off with high school kids,” He said. “They are all about connectivity and staying in constant contact with their group of friends.”
(The press release itself might have had these quotes in it. Using a quote from a company supplied press release is resplendent game. You should include a link either to the press release where ever you found it, or benefit to the company’s media page.)
Conclusion: Although I miss the old-fashioned days, it sure would have been dapper to have one of those new-fangled SuperPhones when we were in school – or words to that effect, with a couple sentences summarizing the main point. Final sentence: “Although I have to admit my wife still has that old misdirected school designate preserved in the pages of her high school yearbook right next to my describe. I calm haven’t worked up the courage to tell her it wasn’t meant for her.”
(You can see my outlines are pretty loose. Make yours any map that helps you. Fair in case, I’ll remind you the above is a fictitious example, there is no Apple SuperPhone, I don’t even know anyone named Stacy – honestly dear, I just made that up.)
The press release will almost certainly have a contact name. The contact’s job is to acquire certain that this novel product is talked about, hopefully in estimable light. Call them, email them, tell them you are a freelance writer working on a part for Associated Content (or wherever you plan to publish) and ask if they have time to answer a few questions about the product. Present that you’ve read the available materials, but would like to discuss how the product fits into today’s teen lifestyle or some angle that relates to the user benefits they’ve published, but isn’t already spelled out explicitly in their materials. If they think you will help emphasize their key talking points and that you have access to some audience that will read what you write, you will quite often pick up an interview.
If they say no, be persistent. Ask “When is a good time to call encourage.” Leave messages, whatever it takes, but always be polite and professional. When you do get someone on the line, be prepared. Have your questions written out in advance of making the first contact. You want to appear professional. Be friendly, this isn’t a Geraldo Rivera ambush interview. The product manager is helping you with your article, and you are helping him publicize his product. You can ask difficult questions, like “Isn’t $400 a lot of money for a tenth-grader? ” He won’t mind as long as you keep it civil. Asking the same question another diagram “How can you sleep at night knowing that kids are robbing gas stations just to get the money for a new SuperPhone,” for example, might end the interview and your chances for future interviews. If you do get an interview, ask for his personal contact information for future products and thank him for his time. You want to cultivate relationships with people who can provide you information for your articles. Offer to send them a copy of the article when it’s done. A grand professional article will go a long way toward getting you that next interview.
If your review of a product is negative, again keep it professional and be nice to the product manager. Throw in a couple of his talking points so he can salvage something from the article. Give him and advance copy and ask if he’d like to discuss any of the points you raised. This might wind up in the article in something like this: “Although I found the calendar feature confusing and clumsy, SuperPhone Product Manager, John Doe, assured me that ‘with a couple of days of practice it really becomes intuitive and many customers end up preferring it to their old system.’ Well, frankly, it’s been a week, and I still can’t gather it to let me know when my appointments are coming up.”
Good contacts are invaluable tools for writers. If a SuperPhone factory explodes in Bhopal, India, you’ll have someone in the company who will take your calls and maybe refer you to someone who will discuss that situation with you. Contacts equal stories.
Make positive you tag up at the company’s website for media access. Often companies will release materials for the media under embargo conditions. This means you get approach information on the condition that you agree not to publish it until a sure date. This gives you the advantage of being able to have your article completed and ready to publish during the first minute of the press conference, when the whole world is out there looking for information.
So after all that, what did you get out of the press release? You got the background for your “High School Notes” article, you got a lot of in-depth information about the new SuperPhone, you got a gracious contact who will give you inside information about novel products, and the company as a whole, and you got automatic early notification of new corporate initiatives and products. So why not write up a review of the SuperPhone based on what you learned, and then write up a comparison of the SuperPhone to your old Motorola phone, and then write a story about teen-agers and their need to be constantly connected to their group of friends using some quotes you already got from John Doe at SuperPhone. And by the blueprint, SuperPhone company just announced a new green initiative, can John Doe put you in touch with a spokesman on that for another article? Call John Doe after reading a news item about exploding cell phone batteries in OtherPhones and interview him about that -Are SuperPhones likely to experience this exploding battery problem? Why not? Why are OtherPhone batteries exploding? What steps does SuperPhone company take to make sure their batteries are safe when they’re developing new products? Can he give an example of a problem SuperPhone had and how they fixed it? Then call up OtherPhone’s press contact and ask them if they want to respond to SuperPhone’s assertion that OtherPhone batteries aren’t as capable as the one SuperPhone uses. This one press release and development of a top-notch contact can lead to many, many articles over your writing career.
Just be sure to space out your calls a bit, don’t call John every week or three days for another story. instead develop as many contacts with as many companies as you can. Sign up for PR releases in your field of interest. And for goodness sake, if you want to be a writer, you need to write. Set aside time every week for research and time every day to write. Have a friend or family member read everything you write. When I don’t, I invariably miss awkward phrases, grammatical errors and all sorts of things I don’t really want in my articles.
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Filed under conference call vendors by on Jan 17th, 2012. 
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