An Online Dating Blog by Shimrit Elisar

Dodgy press releases (again)

June 16th, 2007

There is a fine line between creating a newsworthy, attention-grabbing publicity pieces and making your press release seem too unlikely to be true.
Dating, love, sex, relationships: they are all hot topics that can forever be used to get journalists interested. We all know that many tabloids don’t bother checking their facts, but even the laziests, greediest journos have their limits.

Here’s an example of a pretty dodgy press release.

I got excited when I saw this headline:

Half of Brits try online dating

I started reading the full article:

More Brits than ever are turning to the internet to find love, new research has revealed.

Fifty-three per cent of Brits admit to registering on an average of two dating websites and 83 per cent have been on a dating site at some point.

This is big, big news, n’est pas? This seemed like a juicy piece for me to comment about, until, somewhere down the line, the standard press release structure came through. Turns out this was a poll of 3,000 people conducted for a certain UK dating site.
Not exactly a blinding proof, is it? Crude workmanship annoys me.

Of course, I’m just being mean. Usually, at least one tabloid would pick up on something like this. It’s just that this has not exactly been a slow news week, so the papers have mostly been talking about Gaza and Paris Hilton and Barrymore. As it stands, though, I’ve not seen this picked up yet. Am keeping my eye out though!

Entry Filed under: Marketing Dating Sites