They are the ones often with the least expertise but the biggest need to penetrate the Inner Newsroom Sanctum. (Unless they become their OWN publicist on the Web, which I’ll also talk about on here.)

But when it comes to e-mailing press releases, here’s my first two-word suggestion for you: Microsoft Word!

NOT WordPerfect. NOT Microsoft Publisher. You are NOT trying to make pretty stuff for ooh and aah of editors. You are trying to get your WORDS to them, about your event, group, new hire, big announcement, etc. In as easy-to-handle a format as possible, so … use the standard. Please?

Now I’m gonna say this in a lot of places around PRM (ah yes, the site’s acronym - I gotta make a mental note to talk about overuse of acronyms;-): If you are hand-delivering or mailing a news release, go ahead and be a bit creative (though too wacky can really get in the way).

But for folks like me, who would like to cut and paste your information into our Website, Word is “da bomb.” (Izzat the saying?) And the other option is to just type (or cut/paste) the message INTO the body of your e-mail. Many organizations are even doing both now - which is a GREAT idea, allowing you to do purty formatting on the Word version, and the straight ASCIIish text in the e-mail itself.

Options are good. But opening a file of garbage characters is not.

Any questions? (Of course!)