Mourning the Press Release

I attended Chinwag's PR Unspun this week in London and enjoyed listening to the speakers - most of all Neville Hobson. He talked eloquently about the changing landscape of PR and was vehement in the defense of the Press Release when I asked when we could consign it to the bin. Neville countered that it was a tool of the trade that had a lot of life left in it for many. To be fair I agree with him and should have asked

"how long until companies and agencies start using better language in a press release?"

The reason I asked is on the way to the event I was traveling on the Tune and whiled away the time with a copy of IT Week. I've not read it for a while and frankly it was shocking. Talk about overuse of the words "revolutionary" and "innovative" not to mention "aligned" and "exciting". The PR folks can help change this I hope.

I really enjoy reading Jack Schofield in The Guardian but when I read his commentary on our recently announced Silverlight product this week it depressed me. It's not Jack's fault that his article contained sentences like this

"WPF is the new way of developing user interfaces in Windows Vista, and is supported in XP via the Net 3.0 Framework. WPF/E provides a way of deploying powerful Vista-style programs across a network via Internet Explorer, Firefox and Apple Safari browsers. These RIAs can be deployed on Linux servers, says Microsoft"

What? I mean I know what that means but that's my job. Does anyone outside of IT really understand that?

Neville is right - the work on Press Releases is far from done.

Technorati tags: chinwag, press release, neville hobson, silverlight