Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Press Release

Dave Barry has been one of my favorite authors. I think of him as the most humorous writer I have read, with due apologies to PG Wodehouse fans. Dave is more of the spontaneous variety of humorists and he is outrageously funny. His forte is exaggeration.

One of the funniest bits I read of him was about ‘Press Releases’. For the sheer charm and audacity of that, I wanted to reproduce it here. This despite the fact that my friend is in Corpcom, who will be up in her arms against me on seeing this and I want to see that genuine laughter at the sheer audacity of this attempt. Audacity of Dave, not mine. Me, I am just a courier. I treat this as one of the Press releases that I stumbled upon or being forced to circulate. Now, over to Dave…

For the benefit of those of you have real jobs and are not involved in the news business, I should first explain that a ‘news release’ is an article that has been typed up by a Public Relations professional hired by a client who wants to get certain information published, which is then mailed out to several thousand newspapers, almost all of which throw it away without reading it. If you ever really commit a horrible crime and you want to keep it out of the papers, you should have a public-relations professional issue a news release about it

You ask: “Wouldn’t be more efficient if the public-relations professionals simply threw the releases away themselves?” Frankly, that is the kind of ignorant question that makes us journalists want to forget about trying to inform the public and instead just sit around awarding journalism prizes to each other.


Wasn’t it pretty funny, I thought so. Well I was talking about the writing. Other than that, I don’t think I have an opinion about what Dave has written. He is entitled to his opinion. Who am I to even comment? Afterall all I want is some good laugh.

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