Shel's On It... Blogs Don't Replace News Releases

A post worth reading... of course blogs won't replace news releases. Much like blogs won't replace magazines. I've written about this so many times that I won't rant on again about it here. Other than to say...

The press release performs a key technical communications function. It's the official, final, absolute communication from a company. And that moves markets and influences decisions like no other. It'll be here for a long time. Ok, it's getting commoditized like everything else - prices are coming down, richness and distribution are going up, folks are getting much more targetted... but they are here to stay... I promise.

Too often people think of this little paper mechanisim when thinking of a release. For the most part they are digital and have as much utility as a blog. Many are RSS enabled - just like a blog. (I get all my Sun releases via RSS). And as Shel rightly points out, they're written for the press. At least some of them are.

And as Shel says:

None of which suggests that company executives shouldn’t blog. Opening a channel of communcation between an organization’s leadership and key external audiences is one of the best business uses of blogs. But it doesn’t eliminate the need for press releases any more than the introduction of e-mail eliminated the need for telephones and faxes.