I chanced upon an interesting format of a press release. There was no longer the ’so and so company/ person today announced…’. sentence in the opening para of the release. The content was simple and to the point. The spokesperson quotes were not merged into the rest of the content as one long story. Instead they came in bullets under their own section titled ‘Quotes’. There was a list of key points highlighted in another section called ‘Quick Facts’.

This was a format of one of the press releases issued by the Ontario government that I happened to see quite by chance browsing through my Del.icio.us subscriptions (thanks to Boyd’s post).

Now what is so interesting? While the standard opening sentence of press releases have been omitted in many press releases by government organisations and NGOs in India and it’s not new, how the Ontario Government placed their quotes and the Quick Facts were new (at least to me).

Is this just a good example of a social media news release? Or can we replicate the same for our press releases that we issue to the traditional media?

Pros: Content is to the point and well segmented that helps reading easily. One can notice the key points quickly without going through the entire document.

Cons: Journalists have to redo the draft. So if you are looking for a time-crunched editor who will quickly cut a portion of your release and put it into tomorrow’s paper, then this is not the ideal format.

What do you say? This is how one of them looked like: