Week 112: Press Releases Revisited
This week I'm revisiting the advice given in Week 48, specifically the information about press releases. This would be a later section of the book for after you've reached the point of having a team competing in multiple events.
This section also will be part of a series later in the book about handing responsibilities over to players on the team. As the team develops there are tasks that can and should be devolved from the coach to the team, in order to broaden the team's skill set. Handling press releases just happens to be one of the easiest cleave points. For the student who takes on the task, they learn a very applicable skill that they can use for all their future activities.
The press releases you can send:
Press releases for national tournaments
Some national tournaments do do the work for you, if you've provided NAQT with a press contact, we try to give every press contact a pre- and a post-event press release if you go to a National Championship Tournament. For others, you need to do the push yourself. If you want to see what these look like, you can search news feeds for NAQT, and find versions which papers have written from press releases I have sent out before and after the tournament. Some you can even see what the templates we wrote them from looks like, because the paper has just copied and pasted our work.
Press releases for a major non-national tournament (City, County, or State championships)
You probably aren't going to succeed in getting press reaction for a circuit invitational tournament, unless it's the only one you're doing this school year. But for major events, events that you had to qualify to attend, events which are larger, require some level of travel, or have some level of prize or further promotion upward from them.
Going after television for nationals events.
From working with a PR firm for ICT the past few years, I've seen components of their effort. One of the things they targeted heavily, which I had not really pursued compared to local newspapers, was local television news coverage. For the purposes of a coach of a single high school or middle school team, local TV stations aren't going to see the team as newsworthy. To get them reliably interested means there needs to be an bigger hook than "our team is going to nationals."
- If the station has a show, and your team qualified for nationals because of the show, they may be interested, because that ties their show to something bigger. But this means only one station in town will be interested in that story.
- If there are many teams which are going to nationals from within the viewing area of the station, the station might be interested. The trick here is you would need to coordinate information with all the teams going, and include all that information within your press release. This doesn't guarantee that your team will be the one to get coverage, but it improves the chance that someone in the viewing area gets coverage, which you can then point to.
- If the event itself is within the viewing area, showing there are local teams facing the best teams in the country can be a powerful lead which would interest the news. But in this case, there’s likely to be lots of local schools competing, and so the guidance of the previous point applies here.
Press releases for your school media
This sits at the midpoint between promoting your team to get attention, and promoting your team to get additional recruits. Just as there is a value in publicizing the quiz bowl team outside the school, there is a value in publicizing the team inside the school. The more publicity inside the school, the easier it is to recruit new players, get help from other faculty members, and funding from administration and the school board. For a team to succeed over multiple years, all of those help ensure that the team survives and thrives; and if nobody knows you exist, you’re always at risk of disappearing. There's also a benefit here in that you are giving the journalists on the school paper an opportunity to work from a press release, which is a commonplace practice in journalism which isn't usually reflected in school papers.
The one thing to note here as a limiting factor is that most school newspapers are limited in getting things out at the beginning of the school year. For that reason, the recruiting boost will be minimal if you contact them early in the year. But if you want to be recruiting for your team throughout the year (and you do), this is a way to get mid-year recruitment and publicity.
Press releases as part of a push for funding the team.
If you are organizing an event to get your team funding, a press release to the local paper is an essential part of your overall promotional strategy, and is likely to end up as part of the paper's community calendar. This is less true if you're using some sort of online funding system as the press release is likely to be round-filed by the newspaper.
What are the details that need to be in a press release from your team?
- Roster, including coaches. Give this information in sentences, not in a table or list. Once the media has names this gives them the "Who" that the story is about. The media needs that to be local people from a local team. The story is not the tournament, it is who is going to the tournament.
- If you have multiple teams going to the tournament, explain what sending an A and a B team means. If you have teams going to multiple divisions of the same tournament, explain the differences between the divisions.
- If this is a championship, what were the qualifying events which got the team there?
- Where has your team competed this season? How have your teams (and players) done?
- If you have statistical performances you want to note, make sure you explain how scoring works.
- What is the full and correct name and date and destination of the event to which the team is traveling? I've seen dozens of stories mismatch the name of the host, the name of the event, and the name of the location. When that happens, it can send interested people to the wrong hotel in the wrong city, asking for the wrong event, and not knowing where they went wrong, because the press release was wrong. I've seen that happen, and the confused people had a camera crew following them. It was not a good look. Get the details right.
- How many teams are going, and are any of those other teams in the media's coverage area? This is to get media who cover larger areas interested.
- What is quiz bowl? Feel free to steal the text for this from NAQT's press guide's first frequently asked question, or write it yourself. https://www.naqt.com/nationals/press-guide.jsp
- What is the local name for quiz bowl in your area? This has to be included as a way to explain the concept to local people. You should use the local name preferentially for local media, as it will be familiar to locals, but you should use quiz bowl at some point in the press release to infer to the press that they should use a term which will be familiar to more people overall.
- How does the media contact you and how do they contact the organizers of the event? Having contact information for all parties at the bottom of the press release means that if the media want to add detail to the story, they're just a phone call away.
- Will the event be on media or on the internet, and how could someone follow the competition? Media is slowly getting over its wariness about linking to events' live coverage, but it's still a tough sell. They are still more likely to withhold the links to scoreboards or zoom coverage of finals, because a link can't go in the print edition. But they're getting better at linking to events online, and as long as hosts improve their ability to view events or see live results, this is likely to improve.
The two things you don't actually need to explain in the pre-event press release: the game format, and the tournament format. You don't need to put these into the press release because those are details to something that is not the main thrust of the story. The story is the team is going to compete, not this is how they will compete. Those format details will be shown if there is live coverage, because that is when those details matter.
The hardest thing about writing press releases is remembering all the details that make perfect sense after a little experience that were completely incoherent jargon without experience. You have to write the explanations into the text, but those explanations have to earn the space they will take up on the page.
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Short follow up: This weekend is the Middle School National Championship Tournament. I had hoped to have gotten Catie's school started by now, but it turns out they didn't even go to the tournament they were planning for. Since she's going to high school next year, I'm probably not going not going to get them started next year either. It's a little disappointing to me, but hopefully seeing two pieces of information may spark the principal to action for next year. The host of the tournament they were aiming to compete in, Bishop Canevin High School, competed in the SSNCT's Open Division this year, and Central Catholic, the headline school in the diocese is competing in the HSNCT. It’s not nothing, but I can only plant seeds in the minds of the middle school for next year.