Unmade: media and marketing analysis

Unmade: media and marketing analysis

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Unmade: media and marketing analysis
Unmade: media and marketing analysis
Tuesdata: Why most journalists don't read press releases properly (despite them being the main source of news)
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Tuesdata: Why most journalists don't read press releases properly (despite them being the main source of news)

Seja Al Zaidi
May 01, 2023
∙ Paid
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Unmade: media and marketing analysis
Unmade: media and marketing analysis
Tuesdata: Why most journalists don't read press releases properly (despite them being the main source of news)
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Welcome to Tuesdata, our weekly data-led analysis for Unmade’s paying members.

Below, we explore the point of the communications landscape where PR meets journalism, and examine the immediate verdict of the investment community on yesterday’s departure of Southern Cross Austereo CEO Grant Blackley.

Everyone else hits the paywall a bit further down. Subscribe today to get all of our Tuesdata posts and access our full publishing archive, which goes behind the paywall after two months.

Unmade members also got discounted tickets to our events, including humAIn, our conference focusing on the impact of AI on media and marketing. The coupon code to access the discount appears in this post below the paywall

Guess how many journos will read your press release to the end? One in ten

Today’s Tuesdata focuses on findings from Medianet’s latest Media Landscape report, a survey exploring the key issues in the working lives of PR professionals and Australian journalists.

For the first time, Medianet published a ‘PR Edition’ of its annual report, with 291 PR professionals included in the survey, along wit 1,023 journalists . Topics covered include how journalists prefer to deal with PRs and the best ways to achieve coverage.

One thing was clear in the Medianet data - though press releases are primary sources for stories used by journalists, they receive much less attention than the PR professionals writing them might think.

Medianet’s Amrita Sidhu “
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(Hear how Medianet boss Amrita Sidhu explains the key findings to Seja Al Zaidi in the audio player above)

When receiving a press release, only 11% of journalists said they read the whole thing before deciding if the story is worth pursuing. In fact, the majority of journalist respondents (70%) read less than a paragraph of a release when it lands in their inbox.

Frequency of journalists reading press releases | Source: Medianet

The majority of journalists give press releases no more than a ‘glance’, the data suggests.

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