Tuesdata: Why most journalists don't read press releases properly (despite them being the main source of news)
Tuesdata: Why most journalists don't read press releases properly (despite them being the main source of news)
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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.
(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.
The majority of journalists give press releases no more than a ‘glance’, the data suggests.