Michael Nuñez

I asked media for their PR pet peeves. Here is what Dan Ackerman, Editor-in-Chief of Micro Center News (and former Gizmodo EiC, CNET Editorial Director), shared: ☑ Get to the point: Reading through a long email or press release to figure out what the "new" information or announcement is can be a pain. I love seeing an executive summary at the top—this is what's new, and these bullet points are the key takeaways. As I've said to a few colleagues over the years, the operative word in "News" is "New." ☑ Time zones: I deal with a lot of embargoed information. Please, please, please, make sure to include important dates and times in EST and/or PST. Don't ask me to calculate what Central Time is in NYC or to figure out which countries use CET vs. CEST (Central European Summer Time). ☑ Avoid AI: I'm already seeing the dreaded spammyness of AI-generated copy sneaking into press releases. AI tends to deliver an extra-large serving of word salad. Don't feel like you have to pad a word count with AI—shorter and more direct is better. ✅ Bonus: A reverse pet peeve! I hate to give this secret away, but following up works. I can have thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) of unread emails. If you follow up, it's statistically more likely that I'll see your email and devote a few minutes to reading through it and considering it. If you don't hear back from a likely candidate you expected to hear from, there's at least a decent chance the email just flew by in the daily torrent. [EiC (Editor-is-Chase) note: Be sure to check out this tech ex-EiC roundtable featuring Dan, where they discuss the state of tech journalism in 2024: https://lnkd.in/gi7Utihb] ✍ 🚘Media drive-by takes on PR #pr #publicrelations #communications #mediapov

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Life often moves at a frenetic pace. The last thing our readers want or need from us is a story that tells only a piece of a jumbled picture. I’ve long been a proponent of enterprise reporting: deeper stories about why things happen the way they do. During a Quad-City Times/Dispatch-Argus newsroom vision meeting last week, I identified different approaches to reporting that may help us better serve readers: 1. A higher percentage of enterprise stories 2. Swarming high-interest stories with follow ups 3.  Providing clarity stories 4. Creating takeaways from dense reporting. Of these four, clarity stories are the least comfortable for many of us in the newsroom. We report each new development in an ongoing issue, so we don’t see the need to retell the larger story from those already-reported parts. There’s a misguided assumption that readers should be up to speed on our previous reporting.  That’s where the “clarity” comes in. Sometimes we need to step back with fresh eyes and tell the whole story in a concise or narrative format, with the result being readers who understand what happened and why.

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