Spinning a yarn...

I’ve always shied away press releases. This aversion is partly due to my news journalism tutor’s over-arching disdain for those 500 or so words of corporate propaganda and my willingness to dine on his every nugget of knowledge. But, mostly, it’s to do with the likes of this:


Not only does this read like the hyperventilating, pant-pissing of an American pre-teen who’s just been asked to join Corey what’s-his-puss in a Mickey Mouse Club boudoir, but it actually has the gall attempts to connect The War in Iraq™ with a music industry puppet who’s happy to espouse: “young people on the streets need to stop fightin’ and just be enjoying’ music cos that’s how we get down.” She really did say that. Those quotation marks prove it.

Essentially, someone else’s viewpoint, such as the above PR garbage, should never muddy your own opinion, particualrly when composing a review. The claw marks of a press officer’s prose is all too easy to spot and, with it, so is that often overused slight, lazy journalism. The whole point of this writing lark is to have an authoritative stance and use it as a clear, unaffected vantage point. You need to have your own voice and not someone else’s. Otherwise, you might as well give it all up.

Funny thing is, now I’m working in comms, I’m seeing it from the other side. The whole process is a cat and mouse courtyard of verbs, adjectives and nouns. It’s a question of who you can trust to tell a story right, and who you can trust to tell a story the way you want it told. A press office win is having a verbatim reproduction of well-oiled copy wangle its way into in the inky pages of newspapers. A hack’s victory is the exact opposite: cutting through the foliage of spin and hyperbole to get to the trunk of truth lurking beneath.

So what of that truth? Well it’s always there in some form. It can be dolled up to the nines like a spinster at a school reunion, but it will always exist. And that, I suppose, is half the fun of the whole charade. To think of it as a duel seems a little far-fetched, but I’m sure there’s scores of press and comms officers who see it exactly like that as they spend countless hours conjuring up more and more unique ways of filtering their messages through the media. Of course, the most effective way of doing this would be to buy up your own media company but I guess we don’t all Rupert’s money, do we?