New month, new focus: press releases.

Imagine you’re a journalist.

Imagine you’re in the newspaper industry.

You’re constantly thinking about your job security — and about the fact that you’re trained to work in a dying business.

You’re under never-ending deadline pressure.

You think and craft and mold your piece all day long. And when it’s finished, there are no compliments. There’s no dap. There’s only the next story to start working on. (News rooms are notorious for their silent management style. If you don’t hear from your editor, it means you’re doing fine. How’s that for positive reinforcement?)

You’re constantly fielding phone calls, emails and press releases from people who want you to write about them.

A hundred press releases daily. Sometimes more.

And now imagine that 95 of those press releases are flat-out terrible.

So bad that it’s painful to try to read through the headline and the first paragraph — which is why most journalists don’t.

Chances are, you’re probably sending journalists mass-mailed press releases or pitches.  Chances are you’ve never talked with many of the recipients of your releases. And chances are your releases and pitches are typically terrible.

Now put it all together and imagine how horrible your chances are of turning your terrible pitch into a story with that journalist.

And here’s the saddest and most exciting part: it’s incredibly easy to immediately and dramatically improve your media pitches.

Tomorrow, I’ll detail more specifically the many problems most press releases have.

Then, on Friday, I’ll start detailing how to improve them.

And I repeat: it’s frighteningly easy. But it does take a bit effort. The question is, do you want to improve, or do you want the easy way: the way it’s done now?