The Press Release Is Dead

The anti-coup protests in Iran have demonstrated that the world of the press release is now officially dead.

I guess it's pretty obvious that the press release was dying. It's a very one-way, very inauthentic method of communicating. It is carefully, centrally crafted. It takes hours to be approved by bureacracies. And once it goes out, it's almost immediately discredited as self-serving.

As Andrew Sullivan puts it,

You cannot stop people any longer. You cannot control them any longer. They can bypass your established media; they can broadcast to one another; they can organize as never before.

Think about how CNN -- roundly discredited in its treatment of the Iranian protests -- treats press releases. During the chaos of the past twenty-four hours, CNN would have certainly reported on any kind of "official statement" released by an Iranian government authority. To CNN, stuck in the past, an official statement from a governmental authority isn't some unreliable student protester on the ground running for his life and publicly twittering about it. It's a press release. It's from a central government. Someone might have even typed it up in an office located at a government agency. To the old media, that has credibility. The new generation doesn't trust it.

The same thing happened during the presidential primaries and election. The blogosphere would almost never simply report on an official press release from a campaign's media office. Those releases were considered so inauthentic and obviously self-interested that they became meaningless. So while mainstream media types would lead stories with bland press releases, blogs were publishing them only to vigorously tear them apart and figure out what was really happening.

Right now, society's informational ecosystem is getting much more densely populated. People get information from experts with blogs on specific areas, from general bloggers like Andrew Sullivan, from twitterers, and yes, occasionally, from the New York Times or CNN or other members of the mainstream media. It's a crowded field.

And this doesn't just go for news organizations. Public relations and marketing are changing too. My understanding is that press releases sent out to media bigwigs about new products mean less and less. Developing relationships with the real thought-leaders in your field and getting them to truly understand and trust what your organization is about is now much more important.

People will gravitate toward whatever information is most relevant and most trustworthy. Relevance is created by speed and subject matter of the dispersed information. Trust is created when the source of the information has a history of expertise, impartiality, and an established relationship with readers.

Press releases generally don't create either relevance or trust. In the Darwinism of this crowded new media environment, they don't survive.