Today, we talked about something in PR that took me back to Journalism Class–the inverted pyramid! This is how press releases are structured! Journalists also employ this style of writing in order to engage the readers for the longest amount of time possible. It goes like this,
MOST IMPORTANT INFORMATION
DETAILS/NARRATION
BACKGROUND INFO
LEAST IMPORTANT
If an editor doesn’t find the lead or opening lines of a story or press release, it will not get run. This is incredibly important to earn your audience’s interest so you can keep them long enough to care about what you are saying. If you start out with what you find to be interesting, but doesn’t interest them, you have lost the battle already. I found this interesting that PR uses this principle as well. It seemed like just a newspaper thing, but it makes sense why this principle would apply in anything! Don’t you tell people you just meet the most interesting things about you, and then they find out you’re a huge weirdo? That’s simply how it works. We are willing to accept less exciting or perfect things once we’ve been roped in and formed an attachment with something.
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