Media: A word of advice to PR people who want me to print their stuff
Do. Not. Send. Me. PDF. Files.
I’m not gonna retype your press releases. I’m not going to OCR your documents. I’m not going to upload your PDF files to my site and then hope my readers click on them. I don’t work for a newspaper, so I don’t have to print ANY of them, and I don’t feel the need to reword these things to maintain the fiction it’s original reporting. I am perfectly happy to cut and paste.
The easiler it is for me to put it on my site, the more likely I am to put it on my site. PDF formats are hard to work with. And the harder it is to work with, the less likely it is to be reprinted on Peoria Pundit or Verbatim.
So sending me a press release in a PDF format is an effective in getting your news on Peoria Pundit as writing it out longhand on the back of a candy wrapper, crumpling it up and toss it it at my house from a moving car.
Don’t send me email explaining the very good reasons you think you have for mass emailing of PFD documents (’the client wants it that way’ being at the top of the list). Really, there’s not a molecule in my body that gives a rat’s ass.
Thank you.
P.S. And if you think there are newspaper editors who don’t send this stuff to the recycle bin, think again.
.
January 13th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
Seriously! Why do PR people not get it? I’ve worked in a couple different news rooms where all .PDF press releases were thrown away. IT guys have some qualm with putting Acrobat on the computers and they make it so no one can download the program themselves….hell, I’ve worked in newsrooms where MS Office documents were a problem until Open Office started gaining popularity.
Just put the damn text in the e-mail. If you want to attach a pretty document because that’s how they taught you to do it in school, then attach one, but put all the relevant information in the body of the e-mail
January 13th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Ryan,
As an IT guy, may I suggest a big batch of chocolate chip cookies or a gift basket with Mt. Dew and assorted Frito-Lay snacks. That’d pretty much get you whatever software you wanted.
Bill,
Would you prefer monsterous-sized Word docs? Or maybe you’re still using WordStar.
January 13th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Is somewun a widdlle cwabby today?
January 13th, 2009 at 9:05 pm
I see press releases on this blog all the time.
January 13th, 2009 at 9:35 pm
Ummm, am I the only one with the ability to highlight text in a PDF file and copy it to my clipboard?
January 13th, 2009 at 11:41 pm
“PDF formats are hard to work with”
Huh?…lol
“if you think there are newspaper editors who don’t send this stuff to the recycle bin, think again.”
The same newspaper editors you rail on for not being up to speed with emerging technology… lol Go figure huh.
And what format would you like? Word?… yeah you are just asking for trouble with that one.
January 14th, 2009 at 7:26 am
can you tell us non techno heads what form you do like?
rather than what you don’t like. talk slowly and in english please
thanks
January 14th, 2009 at 8:41 pm
Knight, I was going to offer the same suggestion. Assuming the PDF was created from some text/word processing document, then the text should be selectable, copyable and paste able. If it was scanned then I agree: screw them.