Life would be so good and business so great if that doggone newspaper would just run a news article about your business. You’ve seen press coverage other stores in the country have gotten. Heaven knows you’ve spent plenty of advertising money with that darn paper. It is just not FAIR!

As a former newspaper editor and reporter, I can give you a glimpse from the other side of the news desk. The editor is assaulted with hundreds of self-aggrandizing releases from charities, associations, businesses, government agencies and political candidates clamoring for attention and their moment in the spotlight. If you want a press release to work for you, you must make it work for the news medium. It must be news. It must be newsworthy. It must be interesting to the paper’s readers. How much you spend or have spent in newspaper advertising has absolutely nothing to do with "frost on the rhubarb." The editorial side of the newspaper does not care and resents reference to advertising expenditures.

Allow the news medium plenty of advance notice. Three weeks would be ideal and two weeks the minimum. The editor needs time to assign a story and the reporter needs time to follow up. Your first release may simply be a couple of sentences announcing the event a month in advance. Do your homework and find out what the news deadlines are. For some weekly newspapers it is the Friday of the prior week.

For solid positive publicity, your release has to be less about yourself or your business and more about the community benefit.

Write your release in the active voice. None of this: "There is going to be a hot time in the old town tonight." Instead: "Cloggers from the Academy of Dance will heat up the parking lot at Betsy’s Things to raise money for the city’s annual pet spay and neuter campaign." Specific information that brings a visual image may just get you a photographer as well as a reporter. Keep your sentences succinct, specific and direct. Keep your paragraphs short and to the point.