Financial Services & Recruiting academyrecruiting on 12 Sep 2008 12:00 pm
Is it really “news”, or just another press release?
I see stories all the time - and you probably do, too - that are just press releases masquerading as news.
It’s not hard to spot these things - usually it’s something from MarketWatch with a location, date, and then “PRNewswire via COMTEX” on the first line. Plus they are normally very much self-promoting and self-serving - if the subject of the “news” is the source and the contact for the article…well, not too tough to figure out what’s going on. Sometimes you can actually even see the contact information for the outside person the company contracted to place the press release listed at the end of the story.
That doesn’t mean press releases are all bad - for example, in my last post I referred to an article that was picked up by MarketWatch which was the usual PR Newswire press release. In that case, though, there was actual data from a survey taken by the Association for Financial Professionals, the source of the press release, and I wanted to give my opinion about that data. Granted, still a press release, but one with some substance worth discussing, not something I tried to pass off as some landmark piece of news, and, most importantly, not something that we had anything to do with, or that was about us, or that we were the source for.
So, the next time someone touts something as “news” because it was picked up by one of the major business magazines (like Business Week, Fortune, or CNN Money), or news services (like Reuters or AP), take a closer look - you might be surprised to find out that it’s just another press release.
