[Fsfe-ie] press releases

Fergal Daly fergal at esatclear.ie
Fri May 7 13:04:44 CEST 2004


One lesson from the e-voting campaign is that press releases should be
mostly if not entirely quotes from individuals. This makes it easier for a
paper to publish your quote. This seems to be how the political parties and
other groups do it and when we did it we seemed to get more printed quotes
(that may also have been related to the build up of coverage at the time).

A consistent point of contact (or two) is also good.

Finally, in terms of drafting, the evoting releases were very successfully
drafted completely in the open rather than by a selected few. It was a small
number of people who did most of the writing/rewriting but having it open
meant drafts got useful comments from a very large group. These were then
integrated into the draft by whoever "owned" that release.

I don't know if that's the most suitable technique for this group but it may
be more effective than leaving all the work to a small number of people with
various time constraints,

F

On Thu, May 06, 2004 at 11:07:07PM +0100, teresahackett at eircom.net wrote:
> Agreed. But letters and press releases are different, and I think we need both, but the authorisation process is similar. We just need to settle a procedure. For press releases, how about:
> 1. Make a pro-forma document with standard IFSO header, intro paragraph, blank for text, contact info - to be used for all press releases.
> 2. When a topic comes up, slot in the text and send to committee, the website lists: Ciaran O'Riordan, Chairman;Glenn Strong, Secretary, webmaster;Aidan Delaney, Treasurer;Malcolm Tyrrell
> 3. Approval from Ciaran (as chair) and one other?
> 4. When approved, final version to list
> 5. Publish on press release section on website.
> It doesn't take that long to do a press release, it's no more than 2-3 paragaphs of text. I'm happy to do the pro-forma bit after my exams, if this helps.



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