Telling Your News – Press Releases
Write For Slots
Check the editorial pages of a selection of trade and industrial magazines and you’ll see that different kinds of news items are usually grouped into sections, or ‘slots’. For example, there will be one or more pages of general stories such as company mergers or takeovers, corporate results, distribution agreements, and so on – the news slot. There may also be a new products slot, an orders slot, an appointments slot, and so on. This slot principle is very important, because it places certain imperatives upon the press release writer.
Your release must start with a
heading which immediately points the story towards one of the common slots in magazines. A release headed ‘New sales director for Harrisons’ is instantly identifiable as for the appointments slot, ‘Harrisons win £2m order for...’ is for the orders slot, etc. But what does the editor do with something headed ‘Harrisons chairman slams government over-regulation’? It doesn’t fit a slot, so out it goes.
This is a common Beginner’s Mistake, often justified on grounds of economy. However, it’s false economy. For example: a release headed ‘Harrisons moves into United States market, appoints new export sales manager’. A logical connection, perhaps, but this one release covers two slots; general news, and appointments. No editor wants the bother of re-shaping it into two separate stories, so it’s possible that he won’t use it at all. Besides, putting out two separate stories gives you the chance of two possible editorial appearances in each of your target magazines. So go on, splash out and hang the economics!
To avoid any appearance of favouritism, most editors take care not to pack slots in individual issues with several stories about one organisation. So if you send out three ‘order’ stories in quick succession, all in time for the next magazine issue, the editor will normally use only one of them. The choice of which one goes in (if any) will be at his discretion; it may not be the one you thought most important, and you’ve wasted the other two. The moral is: If you feel the urge to send out more than one story per week or month,
make sure they are aimed at different slots.