It’s a sad and tragic fact that almost all of the press releases PRs write will go unnoticed. If it makes you feel any better, journalists are all too familiar with rule one of tech press: No one reads it anyway.
However, there is a dirty trick in PR land and it is a trick that we journalists are all quite familiar with. The re-issued press release.
I was recently tasked with the job of writing a feature about location based services. For those of you not familiar with LBS, it’s been around a while, and because of that it can be a bit tedious.
Ordinarily, I would probably delete press releases about this tiresome subject without a second thought. However, since I was writing about the subject, I decided to be professional and follow one up. It wasn’t very exciting, but at least it was half relevant. And, shock horror, I even used some of it in my feature. The news item even went onto our website.
So far, so Good PR. When I received the self same press release over a month later with a shiny new date at the top I figured that maybe not everything that’s getting passed off as news is entirely bone fide. I'll think twice about anything coming from that source.
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