Stop faxing start e-mailing!!!

Hundreds of Press releases tucked in a fax machine, and a journalist looking through them, frustrated, to find the right one, is a picture that we no longer see in newspapers. Now instead of full fax machine boxes, journalists have a full “inbox”.

Stacy King refers to e-mail as a great boon to the modern Public Relations professional. Rather than the old days spending hours faxing out press releases to individual media outlets, a distribution list can allow you to blanket many publications in a single click.

Journalists are busy people with little time in searching to find press releases in fax machine boxes. If a press release is delivered directly to the inbox of the journalists it’s more likely that it will be given better attention. However it is as easy to send an e-mail as it is to delete it. Simplicity of this process can be tricky.

Distributing releases in this way avoids clogging up journalists’ fax machines with reams of paper, while targeting worldwide. This is what Alison Thicker in the CIPR book “Effective Media Relations: How to get Results”. However, Thicker, puts out a warning that some users build an automatic delete facility for certain kinds of material from certain sources. E-mailing Press Releases can be an easy way of distribution but it can also be deceptive.

Moreover, it is very easy to miss the target of the press release, simply by sending the e-mail to the wrong address. This New Technology can make the Public Relations professionals’ life easier; however it can also make it more complicated.