Keep your emailed news releases to one or two pages with short paragraphs. It is best to insert the news release in the body of the email. Do not send your news release as an attachment. You don’t know which platform or word-processing program the reporter is using. You might be using the latest Microsoft Word program on a PC, but the reporter could be using an incompatible program on a Mac and may not be able to open the file. There could also be problems downloading, which would prevent your release from being read.
Make sure the subject line of your email is compelling. Journalists can easily delete emailed releases unopened, and quite often they do, because they receive large volumes of these daily. Make sure your email is clear and concise. Get to the point with the first sentence. If you don’t grab the reader’s attention at the beginning of the release, the recipient might not keep reading to find out what your news is.
It’s important to be able to send news release information in digital format within the body of the email. With a quick copy-and-paste, the journalist would then have the “first draft” of the story. You have made it easy for him or her to then edit the draft and have a story quickly. Everybody loves to save time, and nearly all journalists are under tight deadlines.