Writing a Press Release: Death by Six-Shooter

I was helping one of my researchers today to edit a press release draft that he had written. When I was writing out the standard formula for a press release in an email explanation, I kept wanting to gesticulate and say that a good press release should deliver the facts quickly and succinctly — essentially six quick bullet points that form a story. Then, a particular idea suddenly struck me:

(Please let me know if this already has been used/suggested by someone else… I plead innocence through shared creativity! I also plead guilty to muddled and morbid analogies/examples, if so judged…)

Death by Six-Shooter:  A press release should knock your reader over like six quick shots that deliver the facts and importance of your story. Humor the following example:

1. The lede:  What’s the news?  I got shot! 
2. The nutgraph:  Where/when/tell me more!  I got shot in the gut when I was in line to buy a caramel decaf mocha at the 15th and J Starbucks!
3. The pithy quote:  The news and its importance, in your own words:  “It really hurts, and this has significant implications for my lifespan.”
4. The detailed description:  Paint me a picture of the story:  There’s now blood everywhere and that might be the duodenum peeking out. No one got a look at the shooter, who was last seen with a venti Americano before fleeing the scene.
5. The background and signficance:  Here’s what else you need to know: I’ve always hypothesized that I’d bite it from a coronary from eating too much KFC. Most people have a 0.01 percent chance of dying from a gunshot at Starbucks versus a 0.09 percent chance from KFC cardiac episodes. But surprisingly, I got shot instead – making this a most unusual finding.
6. The last word:  A pithy statement/quote to sum it up, once more, with feeling:  “Getting shot was unexpected and a hell of a way to go. But this gives us more clues as to whether getting shot while ordering coffee is a new trend for kicking the bucket.”

Feel free to improve upon this… post your versions in the comments!

Cloning the Prehistoric CueCat

Scan and deliver. (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Have you ever wanted to tweet the link to an awesome article you just read?

Great and easy if you’re on reading on the Web, but what if you’re reading from a print magazine or newspaper?

Now you gotta get up from your chair to go to your computer (if you’re near it)… go look up the rag’s website… search for the article… copy the URL… shorten the URL… and zzzzzzzz….

I was reading TIME magazine’s list of “The 50 Worst Inventions,” which included ideas from the the Segway to Venetian-blind sunglasses. But the list also included the CueCat, the personal bar code scanner that was distributed through magazines like Forbes and Wired in the 1990′s enticing readers to look up companies featured in printed ads:

Millions of the cat-shaped bar-code scanners were produced and shipped for free across the U.S., in hopes that people would use them to scan specially marked bar codes to visit Internet sites. (How this was easier than a typing a link, the company never did answer.)

So, the CueCat went extinct. But why couldn’t that concept work today – for tweeting and social bookmarking?

For every print article you publish, you can print a tiny bar code or QR code of a shortened URL to the online version of that article.  A reader can photograph this code with their smart phone camera.

Then, you modify a smart phone Twitter client (HootSuite, Echofon, etc.) to photograph and read these codes, then unwraps the shortened URL and inserts it into the message to be tweeted (not unlike this example of a QR code billboard). Or, modify bookmarking apps for Digg or del.icio.us to read these codes and add the article URL directly to your collection.

The benefits of code scanning, then, isn’t limited to driving more ad traffic or quick searches.

Coincidentally, a PC World article on May 28 reported on that the Microsoft Tag service is no longer in beta.  The website lets users create an inventory of QR codes for their own website pages.

Anyone willing to give this a shot?

A ‘Lowprofit’ Future for Science Journalism?

Investigative journalism is essentially a public good, argues Jay Hamilton, a Duke University media professor. Private citizens pay little to nothing to read news online, while gaining all the benefits reaped from the improved government policy or environmental cleanup resulting from the big break.

Great for the public, bad for the news publisher that spent thousands of dollars in reporter salaries (and potentially lawyer fees). Thus the decline of local investigatory journalism.

To this, Hamilton and other scholars have suggested running newspapers as nonprofits (see also here and here).  Hamilton, who is the director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy, was featured on Duke’s “Online Office Hours” webinar series this past Friday.

During the live Q&A, Hamilton also mentioned the “lowprofit” business model of forming low-profit limited liability corporations, or L3C for short. I was intrigued.

Science journalism is suffering the same, if not worse, extinction trends.  The impact of quality science news — connecting citizens to their local natural phenomena, improved purchasing decisions through increased science literacy — are more subtle and more easily dismissed as expendable. One way to keep reporters paid and science coverage alive, then, might be to create a L3C science news service funded by investors kind to the science outreach mission.

But if a L3C model is used for investigatory or specialty journalism such as science news, how can conflict of interest issues be avoided, with regards to funding sources?

I posed this dilemma to Hamilton.  My question appears at the 34:33 mark:

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