How to write the EOS M10 Press Release

News desks, news rooms, editors and journalists are always pushed for time and up to their necks in potential stories. When your release arrives, it’s important that it's eye catching and communicates the importance of your story quickly and efficiently. This means creating a good headline and giving the most important information in the first paragraph. I.E. Who, What, When, Why, How.

Above everything else, make sure that your story is "newsworthy" as possible. There's nothing that aggravates the press more than blatant plugs of people trying to sell their products, using the media to do it by providing no valuable content and therefore wasting their time plus the ink in their printer to boot.

You have to be aware of the needs of the people in newsrooms and by really understanding the job people have to do, will give you an immediate head start over the competition.

Of course everyone wants publicity and the relationship between commercial organisations and the media has always been mutually beneficial, but you should work to produce something that is interesting to read about. This will take more thought than simply talking about "how great your company is".

Let's look a fictional case study :-

You have launched a new camera aimed at a target market of predominantly younger people who want a simple step up from the camera in their mobile phone.

So What to do ...

The temptation is to title your release "Great new Canon camera"

Well that's one way to kill your story and have it assigned to the garbage immediately.

Instead, think about who this camera is aimed at and why it might be different from every other black box on the market.

One example would be to change your title to "New Canon camera designed for people too stupid to know their F Stops from their Bokeh"

Better, but it risks alienating part of the target market, particularly the stupid people.

So how about "Canon camera aimed at people who are not photo geeks"

Hmmm. You might spot the issue with that. Even the most die hard photo geeks like to think of themselves as being normal. So we don't want to offend them do we?

It's quite constraining isn't it? On the one hand it's hard to think of a message that non-photographers, who aren't on the whole interested in cameras anyway, will understand and yet anything that does not go into detail about the dynamic range of the sensor will enrage a couple of dozen people on photo forums.

Try to find and communicate the story and the 'angle'. Be sure of your facts.

So how about this?

"New EOS M10 Digital Camera puts imaging power and convenience into the hands of the social media generation"

Well, a bit radical perhaps but arguably it just about treads the line between blatant hype and total crap.

Job done, we'd say.