The News Release Makeover

Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston nails the feature

It was a good story: More than 1,000 New Englanders would soon have safe, decent, affordable places to live, thanks to the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston’s Affordable Housing Program.

**Home, sweet home** Mark Zelermyer turns a stodgy bank report into a friendly, fascinating feature-style story. *Image by Sohel Parvez Haque*

But PR convention demands that we reduce good stories to hierarchical blurtations of fact. And that’s what Mark Zelermyer, the bank’s vice president and director of corporate communications, did with the first draft of his news release covering the story.

But by the end of my NOT Your Father’s News Release Master Class, Mark had totally rewritten his release, taking the story from blah to brilliant. What can you learn from his before and after?

Let’s take a look at the first three elements:

1. Headline and deck

Mark started out focusing on “us and our stuff”:

FHLB BOSTON AWARDS $30.3 MILLION FOR AFFORDABLE HOUSING THROUGHOUT NEW ENGLAND

48 Initiatives Will Result in More Than 1,000 Units in Six States

But his rewrite focuses on the impact, not on the event, of the program.

MORE THAN 1,000 NEW ENGLANDERS TO GAIN AFFORDABLE HOUSING

Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston Awards $30.3 Million to 48 Projects

2. Lead

In his first draft, Mark crams all of the W’s into a fact pack lead:

The Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston awarded $30.3 million to support 48 affordable housing initiatives in the six New England states. Of this amount, $14.2 million was awarded as Affordable Housing Program grants and subsidies, with the balance coming as subsidized advances, or loans. The funds were awarded through member financial institutions to projects that will create or preserve 1,004 units of affordable rental and ownership housing for households earning at or below 80 percent of area median income.

The second version shows instead of tells, focusing on specific details about the program’s outcomes. That pulls readers into the story, and it communicates better than a wall of abstraction. Plus, at 24 words, it creates a bridge into the story instead of an obstacle to reading:

A shoe factory turned into apartments for low-income families. Homes with onsite medical care for brain-injury survivors. Flats for young adults leaving foster care.

3. Nut graph

Mark didn’t write a nut graph for his traditional news release, because inverted pyramids don’t have nut graphs. But in his revision, Mark puts the story into a nutshell in a short nut graph:

These are some of the 1,004 households who will move into safe, decent housing thanks to the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston’s Affordable Housing Program.

But wait! There’s more …

In addition to making his story more compelling, Mark also make it more than 30% more readable. To do so, he:

Slashed the length of the lead paragraph by 70%
Cut word count by 37%
Streamlined sentences by 25%
Reduced passive voice by 77 percentage points

It’s no surprise that Mark suggested we change the name of our PR-writing Master Class to “The News Release Makeover.”

How can you write PR pieces that get read?

Journalists spend, on average, just one minute reading a news release. So how can you get the word across in your PR piece?

Learn a simple formula for getting the word across to journalists in 60 seconds or less at NOT Your Father’s PR Writing — our media relations-writing workshop starting Aug. 15.

There, you’ll learn how long your PR piece should be … how to write paragraphs people will read, not skip … how to write sentences that readers can understand … how long journalists think your first paragraph should be.

Plus: Find out how to stop doing one thing that reporters and editors say gets in the way of their covering your story.

Save up to $100 with our group discounts.