The Press Release
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: kyochan @ kyochan.nkay@gmail.com
April 18th, 2006
NK Blogger Makes Case For Press Releases and College Students
(Are You NKay?) It is assumed that organizations know how to write one unless they have their own media outlet (strangely, LiNKGlobal does not have any on display, here’s one, had to google this). And yes, that includes college students running student organization. It is amazing to see how people underestimate them. So what am I talking about?
In UC Santa Cruz, Students Against War, protested at a college military recruiting booth at a job fair. They succeed in driving the military off and then wrote a press release to announce their success. A typical press release has these big bold letters on the top:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
That’s exactly what it means. Once sent, it goes public. And by public, it means everyone. Otherwise, it would state a specific date. On a press release, it is also important to put some contact information on top, so that reporters and interested readers can get some more info from the group. It does not have to be your home number, but it has to be easily accessible. Good press releases are like that.
So with that in mind, Conservative journalist/blogger Michelle Malkin copied and pasted the contact information, phone numbers and all, in the press release on her blog, knowing that it stated FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE. You can see the original press release here, before the numbers were changed to an e-mail address.
As a result, SAW is very upset at Michelle for getting too much public attention. SAW claims they got death threats as a result. Well, too bad. It’s the price you pay for being free. I think people who read this blog knows how I feel when threatened.
The same people who are upset that a veteran columnist went after a bunch of college kids are probably also upset that these saem kids are not taken seriously. So how does blaming Malkin for posting contact info that members of SAW themselves provided to the public make people take them seriously? It doesn’t. You can’t select your public (especially on the internet). And you can’t cry when somebody disagrees with you.
So what if I, kyochan of Are You NKay? made a press release (FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE) about a rally in front of the North Korean Mission in NYC with my e-mail and website url and I start getting death threats? Obviously, I would track down every single source and notify the proper authorities. What would not do is stoop to the same level or worse, sue.
Pay a visit in any university and you’ll find that the most successful student activist groups are experts in writing press releases. College students have shown they can become sophisticated engines of change. So don’t make any excuses for them.
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