ABSTRACT
Journalists and bloggers generally agree that a newsworthy story has at least one of the following elements: Timeliness, Impact, Uniqueness, Conflict, Proximity and Celebrity. Traditional news releases are written as ready-to-publish news stories. In general, three styles of news releases exist, each of which is described in the following sections: Announcement, Feature story and Promotional. A traditional announcement news release should contain only newsworthy information. It should not be a thinly disguised advertisement for their organization. News release headlines are written in newspaper style. Most newspaper headlines are, roughly, complete sentences. The text of a traditional news release begins with a dateline in capital letters and a dash. Companies such as Cision offer databases of contact information for journalists ranging from local to international. A continuing debate in public relations concerns follow-up calls—that is, telephoning journalists to ensure that they received the news release and to offer assistance.
