Tips on Writing a Press Release for a College Seminar

Press releases for college seminars, as well as any standard press releases, are organized in a certain way, having a dateline, headline, inverted pyramid structure of paragraphs, comprehensive lead, and information on professor and department that conduct the seminar. Press releases are aimed to generate publicity through newspapers and other media. Therefore, when writing a press release, you should think of the audience of journalists. To prepare a good press release, check out these tips from college-writers.com.

Format

You should use standard 8 ½ ✕ 11 inch paper. Provide the date of your release and follow it with the contact information for the professor or department responsible for the seminar. Include email, physical address, and phone number, using single spaces. This section should be left-aligned and may contain embedded logos. The same format applies to the recipient’s contact information, as well. Provide the information on when you want this material to be published in all capital letters. All the rest of the paper, including the headline, lead, body, and boilerplate, must be double-spaced.

Headlines

Write your headlines in all caps and don’t make them longer than one line. You should also stick with the newspaper style of headlines. Even if the news source chooses a different headline, such an approach will still help you demonstrate the newsworthiness of your material. Your first paragraph should follow a dateline written in “City, Country” or “City, State” format with a hyphen.

Lead and Hook

The lead is a quick summary of the relevance of the seminar. Quite often, reporters don’t read anything but the lead, if they have any doubts on whether the press release is newsworthy. Your goal is to answer such questions as “who,” “what,” “where,” and “when.” The lead must be one sentence long, followed by the hook. The hook should provide the information that you didn’t include in the lead, providing your readers with some key details.

Body Paragraphs

We recommend that you organize the body of your press release according to the inverted pyramid structure, starting from the most important information, and moving on to the least important information. Try to anticipate the questions that reporters may ask and make sure that your story is interesting to read.

Boilerplate

This is the last paragraph that includes the information on the professor or department that hosts the seminar and its topic. Provide the necessary information on tickets and contacts.