Oak Ridge Winery Appoints New General Manager

Note to PR folk:

The REAL NEWS in a release like this is the person who is the new general manager.

Rambling on and on about how great your winery is before getting to the actual news is boring, disrespectful to the person being appointed and poor news judgment.

In addition: sending out news releases as a PDF instead of PLAIN TEXT makes it hard and time-consuming to reformat for publication. Thus the use of an image, above.

This news release is symptomatic of a larger issue

For what is may or may not be worth, this sort of writing would have gotten an “F” either in my UCLA or Cornell journalism classes or if it had been written by an MSL Group account exec when I was a managing director there.

This sort of poor news judgement and writing is all too common. GOOD public relations is GOOD journalism from the client’s standpoint. Perhaps too few PR people have actually been journalists and have never learned the essentials.

Communications degrees usually offer passing glances at newswriting and short-shrift to the craft. This means that accurate communication suffers.

I was the very last journalism faculty member in the entire University of California system teaching undergraduates as a major. Journalism was eliminated as a major (and folded into communications) because it was deemed too “trade school-like).

I suppose it must be a trade school thing when students are required to learn and exercise critical thinking, assess a wide array of facts and prioritize them in order of importance, to intellectually search for obvious unanswered questions, locate missing data and the write about that clearly and accurately.

And do it quickly.

A look at national news media shows that the lack of real journalism is growing scarcer.

It must be a trade school thing because few universities do it.

Rant over. Have a good Labor Day holiday!