Fixing Common Content Mistakes in Your Press Release

There are a lot of things to consider when getting your news release or content ready for promotion. However, even after you and your colleagues run through the checklist and double-check distribution details, you’re not done.“Communicators must figure out how to tell the larger story of their brands or products in a way that connects emotionally with their audience and inspires them to act,” writes the author of our white paper Driving Credibility & Success for Your Brand: How to Earn More Media.That emotional connection can be put at risk when your audience’s reading experience is disrupted by a typo.When a company sends their press release to PR Newswire, the Customer Content Services team prepares it for distribution. In addition to reviewing the text’s essential elements such as headline, dateline city, and media contact information, we look for any last minute mistakes we can correct prior to sending it out.Here are the three most common press release mistakes we fix.1. Dateline datesWould it surprise you to learn that our editors still routinely see the year 2015 in press releases’ dateline dates? I’ve personally seen three in the past week.After you spend so much time on the most important parts of your content, it’s easy to let your dateline date fall by the wayside.Perhaps you planned to send your press release last week, but needed one more thing to come through before you could issue it. Or you thought it was going to be distributed today, but something changed and now you need to hold it until sometime next week.When going through your press release checklist, don’t overlook the dateline city and date. Including the correct month, day and year of distribution helps readers determine how recent the information is. 

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