7 ways ESPN gets better coverage without press releases
You’re tired of writing them. You can’t stand the approval process. There must be a better way, right? Correct. Just check out ESPN’s successful use of videos, images and brand journalism.
Editor’s note: This story is taken from Ragan Communications’ distance-learning portal Ragan Training. The site contains hundreds of hours of case studies, video presentations and interactive courses.
Say it ain’t so.
Don’t tell me your honchos are demanding yet another press release that every journalist is going to spike unread.
If your executives insist on cranking out product-plugging paragraphs of puffery, pull a page from ESPN’s playbook.
In a new Ragan Training session, Molly Mita, a senior publicist at ESPN, calls upon PR pros to “Reinvent the press release through creative content and storytelling.” The secret is to create content that people will share on social media and reporters will eagerly gobble up.
The trouble with press releases, Mita says, is that the writing, revision and approval process is incredibly time consuming, and you often end up with little to show for your work.
The process and end product, she says, are “very tiring—a lot of suffering for, often, little results.”
Mita explains how ESPN gets its message out through more creative means.
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