press releases

Naming names

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While looking through a number of media handout photos from a national grocery store chain or at least from its public relations agency, it’s obvious that all of the pictures fail to meet basic journalism standards.

Everyone in a photo must be identified. In a fully-controlled situation like a set-up publicity picture, this is easy to do. An improperly-captioned photo shows not only laziness and carelessness on the part of the photographer and the public relations agency, but also a lack of understanding of journalism and the needs of a newspaper.

Naming only one person in a group and then expecting viewers to figure out who’s who is a failure. A company may know its executives but the public does not. Why make readers guess?
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Eight tips for lousy photo coverage

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The press release was sent out last week, the big day has finally arrived and now photographers are showing up to cover your news event. Here are eight tips to help guarantee failure:

1) Hold the event in the darkest location possible. Why waste money on lighting? Photographers can always use a flash or they can do something with Photoshop. 

Another money-saving tip: use the smallest room possible.

2) When photographers arrive at your event, make them wait awhile. Sure, the press release said that it would happen at 1:00 pm but we all know these things never start on time. Besides, photographers have nothing else to do except cover your event.
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Better press releases

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Most press releases don’t get published.

This is partly due to the sheer volume of incoming press releases and partly because of the lack of news value contained in the releases.

But the chance of a press release being published is greater today than ever before. All newspapers, magazines and various news web sites, need and want content, especially free handout material. Demand is high and the supply is much higher. So what’s the problem?
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Better Public Relations Photography

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What’s the difference between a photographer and a photojournalist?

A photographer takes pictures of nouns whereas a photojournalist, or news photographer, takes pictures of verbs.

If you remember way back to grade school: a noun is a part of speech that’s used to name a person, place or thing. A verb expresses an action or state of being, and is the most important part of a sentence.

The average photographer usually takes pictures of animals, nature, architecture and still life. Nothing wrong with that but all nouns.

Photojournalists take pictures of people expressing or enacting such things as anger, joy, sadness, happiness, victory, protest, excitement and more. These are images of people engaged in some sort of physical or emotional state of being. Verbs.
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Three wise men or three blind mice?

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There are currently four new cell phone companies about to start up in Canada. Three of them, DAVE, WIND and Public Mobile will be operating in the Toronto area. Let’s compare their marketing strategies to date.

Web sites:

DAVE is plain and boring and has no useful information. There’s no attempt at excitement and nothing whatsoever to engage the customer. The business image is “we’re cheap and boring.”

WIND is better. This company obviously knows the value of relationship building and is doing everything right in this regard. Unfortunately this site has but a couple of lousy photographs, there’s almost no useful information, and it seems to be trying too hard to be trendy. But at least these folks are thinking about customer engagement.

Public Mobile has some useful information for its customers. The site uses no photography but has some video with its executives. They do try to engage the customer through a blog where potential customers can get answers to their questions.
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Square peg for a round hole

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If you live in Toronto, you may have noticed that the city, or at least its politicians, suffer from extreme New York City envy. Toronto copies New York’s tourism campaigns and slogans, follows all NYC trends, and constantly compares itself to the Big Apple.

Back in 2002, Toronto unveiled its newest slab of concrete called “The Yonge-Dundas Square”, which was modeled after New York’s Time Square.

From the “ydsquare” web site: “A unique aspect of the Square is that it is not operated like other Civic Squares … City Council decided to … operate Yonge-Dundas Square as a business venture.”

And this is where the point to this post begins:

The Yonge-Dundas Square has become a magnet for public relations and some other media events.

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Ready for your close-up

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I photographed a week-long tennis tournament last week for the event organizers. The media relations folks were, as always, fantastic. They were friendly, helpful and always available. They answered every question, sorted out every problem, had all necessary tournament information available and arranged every interview. They even handed out free pizza and beer at the end of each day. On very hot days, they’ve been known to hand out ice cream!
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