How to Write Newstips Electronic Editorial Bulletin Items

Here are the top 10 rules:

#1. Make it fun.
#2. A rhyme may do.
#3. Conversationally.
#4. Less, not more.
#5. Push and drive.
#6. Vocabulary tricks.
#7. Brevity is heaven.
#8. Lose weight.
#9. 3rd person's fine.
#10. They're not all men.

How long has it been since your goal in writing something has been fun?

A well-written Newstips Electronic Editorial Bulletin item should be fun to read (#1). Oh, yes, the journalists who read these Bulletins tell us content is still more important than style, but they also tell us that if it wasn't fun to read, they would never get as much out of it.

Big discovery: journalists are people, too.

Only journalists these days are inundated with information sources and information, all rivals for their attention. In addition to the must-read releases and advisories they get by wire, they also get hundreds to thousands of releases each week by mail, by fax, by e-mail. So it's only human to learn to adapt by raising their defenses against this onslaught.

And that's one reason a Bulletin item shouldn't read like a release.

For all the mass of traditional PR stuff that comes in the front door, a Bulletin has to become a friendly voice at the back door. It offers tips, tidbits and teasers, early word on upcoming news, a whole fast little parade of items from all over the industry. Like anything rapid and brief, the human response is to pick the choicest items.

So each item is like a petit-four on a party tray - sweet, delicious and tempting them back for more. And that's precisely what happens: a journalist finds tasty tidbits that create an appetite for more, then calls for info or an interview or whatever you have to offer.

And as any party or pastry pro can tell you, the preference in petit-fours is for sweetness, not dryness. Fortunately, tickling the taste buds of readers is a fantastically fun motif for writers.

A lot of the writing techniques that might be ill-advised for releases are welcome in Bulletin items. There's no crime in making things rhyme (#2). It'll even create some reader attractions if it ain't immune to slang or contractions. You can always allocate a little alliteration. Heck! Even exclamations can fit!

The tone should be conversational (#3). Think buddy: Hey Joe, did you hear about this? (The tone, not the words). Where a release is written in a formal, official tone, the tone of a Bulletin item should be informal, even casual.

How long should a Bulletin item be? How short can you make it?! (#4) Not counting "Contact:" information, typical items should run 5-6 lines. None should run less than three lines, nor should any ever run more than ten.

While raw hype has no place in a release, you can certainly communicate some excitement in a release. (#5) There's a whole vocabulary (cool, Shazam, nifty, hot, cookin', wow, bonkers,
godzillion, cranking, bogus, wild, crunchy) of colorful words that are perfectly at home in a Bulletin item. (#6)

Remember, the goal of your Bulletin item is a call or message from the journalist. Its job is not to communicate everything there is to know about this week's news, just enough to raise interest. To some extent, less is more. (#7) Ever see those one-liner "news brief" or "at deadline" items? They tell little more than the barest essence of a breaking news story. You may not be surprised to learn that those can result from nothing but the information in a Bulletin item, with no other contact in either direction. Let that be your guide on what minimal information can be adequate! How little can you tell and still tell a journalist that there's something here worth following up? The quicker you can do that job, the more likely a stronger response from the press.

And that's why there are some things you don't want to do in a Bulletin item. (#8) You don't want to include quotes from anybody. You don't want boilerplate on who or what the company is, when it was founded or what it's a pioneer and leader in providing. Give the reporters and journalists who read your items a little credit: either they know who the company is or they know how to find out, if by no other means than by calling you. We advise for Bulletin items what Strunk & White advised about grammar: when in doubt, leave it out.

One of the more unusual attributes of a Bulletin item is that you will write it in the third person (#9), referring to both yourself and your company as if you weren't connected. Please understand, this is a matter of style, lending both informality and credence to the mix. You might even want to consider using collectives like "the gang at [Company]" or "those creataholics" or anything else non-demeaning, informal and fun. Try using words like these: gang, crew, team, clan, brood, squad, even elves.

But whatever you do, no matter how politically correct you're tempted to be, make gender neutrality a mandate (#10), especially where the Bulletin readers (journalists) are concerned. Your best ally here is the word "you". As much as it helps to write about you and your company in the third person, it helps to use the second person when addressing your audience. Unlike the tone of a release (which is often a synthesis of what a journalist would say to his or her readers/viewers/listeners), a Bulletin item speaks to the journalist as a journalist, and calls him or her to a journalistic action.

Would you like to try an exercise? Pretend you just got word that your client, Tom Edison, finally succeeded in making an incandescent bulb work in the laboratory. Here's an example of how you might word your Bulletin item:

  EDISON SKIPS THE SPARK TO CURE THE DARK
   Watch the wires next week for word from Edison's lab that Tom
   and the troops just got electricity to make a light without
   making a fire and without the open electric spark of an arc
   lamp. He calls the new gizmo a "light bulb", and it looks like
   it can outlast whole boxes of candles. Get in touch with
   [Contact] for info, pix or an interview with Mr. E.

  NEW EDISON ELECTRIC LAMP NEEDS NO GAS, NOT EVEN AIR
   Soon, it won't be just fortunetellers who stare into crystal
   balls and see the light of a bright future! Edison's new
   electric light bulb starts with a clear glass sphere, about
   the size of a baseball. Inside, a specially twirled spiral of
   tungsten wire makes heat, but no flame. There's no gas in this
   lamp, not even air, and its vacuum is one of the secrets of
   its success, Tom says. And it doesn't take a fortuneteller to
   see a bright future for this little invention! [Contact] can
   set you up with an interview, info or pix.

  Here we see a few goodies we can add to our first ten "rules":

  [ ] "Watch the wires (for word of)" is a great lead when a release follows.
  [ ] Write like it's news you can't wait to tell.
  [ ] Write like it's news they (journalists) can't wait to hear.
  [ ] It helps to relate new things to familiar things.
  [ ] Personal notes, comments and asides fit the format, and work.
  [ ] Back to rule one - always make it fun!

About now, it's absolutely normal for a writer to experience one of two responses to this advice about how to write a Bulletin item. Some will scream "YES!!" and grin at the thought of being able to work in a more informal style, exercising some of the more fun and creative tricks of the trade. Some will just scream, fearing that this totally foreign way of writing PR materials is against the grain of everything any school ever taught or any organization ever expected. Can't a more formal, routine, dry, matter-of-fact, journalistic approach to this writing work just as well? Well, yes and no.

Content is, indeed, more important than style. But style is a huge help in getting your items read, and in getting responses to them. And on the bottom line, we're all doing this to get you responses from journalists.