Question about writing press releases

[Lee Stanish]

Dear all,
I have put out a few emails requesting press coverage, with no luck so far. I think I am missing the mark on how to write a press release. Can anyone give me some advice? I've read the other emails about press releases, but I'm still not sure how best to do it.

I have a couple questions:

1) Should I write the press release in the first person or third person?

2) Should I address my audience in the press release (e.g. "Hello, my name is...")

3) Should I have a press release title?

These might seem self-evident to many of you, and if so, I would greatly appreciate your feedback! I am cramming in a lot of information right now and my brain is unable to process it all at the moment.

Many thanks,

-Lee

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Lee Stanish
Postdoctoral Researcher
University of Colorado at Boulder
MCDB 112
Ph 413-687-7292

[Alisa G. Woods - awoods]

Press releases are often written in a way that the reporters can actually lift texts and quotes (and they sometimes do). I would write it the way that you would like the article written, with an introduction (who you are and what you're up to).

Here is an actual press release from Public Library of Science as an example (see below). I think this is longer and more technical than you might want (also describing the completed study rather than a proposed one), but it could give you some ideas. You can see that the release is a lot like the article that will likely be written based on it. I will try to find one of my press releases that worked for SciFund 3.

I think the key to getting press coverage is sending lots of press releases. Also, some reporters are now no longer responding to crowd fund projects (booo) so I would emphasize the science above the crowd funding and also if you have preliminary results, maybe feature them.

The number of tumor cells spread to sentinel lymph nodes affects melanoma prognosis

 

Cancer cell spread to the sentinel node—the lymph node to which cancer cells are most likely to spread from a primary tumor—is a risk factor for melanoma death. According to a study published in this week's PLOS Medicine by Anja Ulmer, Christoph Klein and colleagues from the Universities of Tübingen and Regensburg, Germany, the prognosis of a patient largely depends on the number of disseminated cancer cells per million lymphocytes  in the sentinel node. Even very low numbers were found to be predictive for reduced survival.

 

The leading cause of death from skin disease is melanoma, which is the most dangerous type of skin cancer.  When melanoma metastasizes and spreads to other parts of the body, treatment options become limited and the prognosis is poor.  Melanoma staging (and prognosis) is currently focused on the primary tumor itself, with characteristics like tumor thickness, mitotic rate, and ulceration (break in the skin caused by the tumor) indicating the likelihood that the tumor has started to spread. Looking for tumor cells in the sentinel nodes is done for patients who are at increased risk for spread, but standard procedures for how to measure spread to the nodes and how to integrate this information with the tumor histology are needed.  Since melanoma is one of the deadliest cancers, better predictors of prognosis for melanoma patients are needed for patient information and to determine treatment options.

 

The researchers prospectively collected a large number of samples for this relatively rare cancer: 1,834 sentinel lymph nodes from 1,027 patients with melanoma who had been followed for 5 years after the samples were taken.  They labelled disseminated cancer cells (DCCs) in the lymph nodes through the use of a marker for melanoma cells, counted them, and calculated DCC density. They then asked whether DCC density was related to a patient’s survival. They found that patients with high DCC density in the lymph nodes were more likely to die from melanoma within 5 years. A 10-fold increase in DCC density nearly doubled the risk of death. The authors then created a model based on tumor thickness, tumor ulceration, and lymph-node DCC density that provided survival prediction superior to that of a model based on the current standard staging recommendations. The researchers show that their new model predicts patients’ prognosis more accurately. It classified 13% of patients in this cohort correctly as high risk for progression, which the standard model did not. This group of patients could potentially have benefitted from more aggressive treatments. The new model also correctly identified a group of low risk patients who had excellent long-term outcomes, whereas the standard model overestimated their risk of death.

 

These results need to be validated in an independent study, however, in order to establish how this methodology could be used in a clinical setting.

 

The authors say: “Our study shows that the extent of metastatic dissemination largely determines the disease courses of patients. The better we are able to predict the risk of patients to die from melanoma the better can we balance cost and benefit of potentially toxic therapies. For early melanoma, this might become even more important as novel drugs to prevent lethal metastasis are currently under investigation.

 

Funding: This work was supported by grants from the University of Tübingen (IZKF-1686-0-0, to AU) and the Ludwig-Hiermaier Stiftung (to AU) and by grants from the Wilhelm-Sander Stiftung (2003.005), the Deutsche Krebshilfe (108008), and the Bavarian State Ministry of Sciences, Research and the Arts (to CAK). No funding bodies had any role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

 

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

 

Citation: Ulmer A, Dietz K, Hodak I, Polzer B, Scheitler S, et al. (2014) Quantitative Measurement of Melanoma Spread in Sentinel Lymph Nodes and Survival. PLoS Med 11(2): e1001604. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001604

 

IN YOUR COVERAGE PLEASE USE THIS URL TO PROVIDE ACCESS TO THE FREELY AVAILABLE PAPER:

 

http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001604

 

PRESS-ONLY PREVIEW OF THE ARTICLE:

 

http://www.plos.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/plme-11-02-Klein.pdf

 

Contact:

 

Christoph Klein

University of Regensburg

GERMANY

christo...@klinik.uni-regensburg.de

 

or

 

Anja Ulmer

University of Tübingen

GERMANY

anja....@med.uni-tuebingen.de

_______________________________________

Alisa G. Woods, Ph.D., MS

Assistant Professor

Biochemistry & Proteomics Group

Department of Chemistry & Biomolecular Science

Clarkson University, Potsdam, NY, 13699, Box 5810

Office: (315) 268-7763; Lab: (315) 268-2348; Fax: (315) 268-6610

_______________________________________

 

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Sent: Wednesday, February 12, 2014 2:13 PM
To: sci...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Question about writing press releases

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[Anthony Salvagno]

The very long email I sent about press releases had all of our successful coverage, so feel free to model yours after those. 

Personally I tend to write the releases in the third person so the reporter can just copy/paste. Also in my experiences, a lot of reporters just won't respond. In this case, here are a few tips:

If you know someone who knows a press contact, get them to introduce you. The personal contact will help get you in the door.

Send emails frequently. A lot of journalists get a lot of emails, so yours could just get buried. Send a twice weekly or weekly update until they actually respond.

Make sure your subject is descriptive. I've heard that successful grabs are sometimes ones where most details are in the subject line. The goal here is to really catch a reporters attention.

Contact your university's marketing department. They should have people who can help point you in the right direction, or maybe can help give you a push through their outlets. 

Hope this helps!

Ant

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