News Release Journal #24: This chapter focuses on news releases, specifically what they are, how they should be formatted, and how important they are in a professional setting. I’ve never had to write a new release before, so I’m a little nervous about it, but this chapter was very informative about the basics to writing one. Firstly, when writing a news release, the subject has to actually be “news” worthy. It can’t just be about anything, but instead, has to be about something that your targeted audience should find to be interesting or beneficial to them. This is an important distinction because most people just clump announcements and news releases together, so if you don’t know the difference and your boss asked you to write a news release, you might be in trouble. The second point that I found informative was the fact that grammar editing is crucial in news releases. With other documents, sometimes spelling or grammatical errors could be overlooked since they aren’t read by a lot of people, but news releases go out to the public, so everyone can see mistakes. If there are mistakes in your news release, how can the audience be sure that you wouldn’t make mistakes in your company/product? Grammar and editing isn’t so much to make your news release look good, but focuses on your legitimacy. This chapter also focused on the AIDA model once more, and how each section should look in your news release.
*Reflection* News Release Journal #26: When we first wrote our draft, our group did okay, but we struggled with having it sound too much like a promotion and not enough like “actual news”. The feedback we took from the peer review was incredibly helpful, and we were able to take that feedback, discuss, and change some aspects of our news release. While there may still be issues with the final product, I think my group did really well with communicating and making sure that all concerns were met. We also showed a lot of trust in each other to make sure that each portion of the news release was completed and that we had enough time to go over everything. I think all of us were a little lost at the beginning, just because the chapter made it seem like this huge task, so we weren’t sure where to start. I think we did a good job of handling that though, because breaking down each section into parts that each of us could do really helped. One of the biggest things that I learned from this project was the revision and proofreading are instrumental in success. Not everything that you do is perfect, which is why I love getting my work proofread and critiqued (even if it hurts just a little). It allows myself and my group to learn from our mistakes and fix them, but it also helps us see our work from different viewpoints. There were some suggestions made that our group decided not to focus too much on, which also showed me the importance of weighing each criticism. Sometimes, it’s better to stick with your original decisions, but it’s also important to recognize when things need to change. I think that’s where our group really succeeded at. Overall, our group is working well together and we continue to communicate and collaborate efficiently.
Role Narrative: During this project, my role was to upload the logo and title and create the first attention paragraph as well as the final call to action paragraph. The first job was easy, since I had already created the logo and I could simply put it in the document. Although, during peer review, we were suggested to make the logo a bit bigger, since some of the details were lost in the draft. Making the logo bigger was a little challenging at first, just because of how much we had written as well as the overall format of our document, but in the end, I was able to make it work. The attention paragraph was a little tricky for me, just because I’m more of a “here’s how things work so you should listen” kind of person. I decided on making the news release about having our product going to the Maine Mall in order to try and bring in a whole community of people, rather than just people who live on the UNE campus. I think it worked out in the end, considering that my group members liked the decision and it received mostly positive feedback during peer review. I also had to write the call to action, which was also a little hard just because I’m not great at transitioning from information to “you should buy this!”. My first call to action wasn’t the best, since it was just a blunt statement that said, “For more information, go to…”. In peer review, someone said that the call to action shouldn’t lose the passion that the rest of the news release had in it, which was a piece of feedback that I tried to build on because I thought it was helpful. In the end, I’m sure that I could have done better in some aspects of the news release, but I think for a first news release it went well!
