What a journalist actually needs
It is a short list and it almost never changes.
- A biography they can quote, ideally in three lengths: one line, one paragraph, and three hundred words.
- Photographs at print resolution with a clear statement that they may be used, and a credit line for the photographer.
- The correct spelling of your name, your project's name, and any accents or capitalisation that word processors get wrong.
- A named contact with an email address that is checked.
Everything else is optional. The list above is the difference between being written about accurately and being written about approximately.
Write the biography three times
The one line version ends up in listings and captions. The paragraph ends up in the piece. The long one is for the writer to draw from and will never be printed in full.
Write all three yourself, in the third person, without adjectives you would be embarrassed to hear read aloud. Award winning, innovative and passionate are three words that survive no edit and make the rest of the paragraph suspicious.
Update the one line version whenever the newest thing changes. Update the others once a year.
Photographs, and the permission to use them
This is where most press kits fail, and the failure is legal rather than aesthetic.
Include the photographer's name and a plain sentence saying that these images may be used in editorial coverage with that credit. Without it, a careful publication will not run the photograph and a careless one will run it and cause you a problem later.
Supply two or three, at print resolution, in landscape and portrait. A single square crop from a phone is not usable at print size, however good it looks online.
Delivering it without an email
Put the kit behind one short link and put that link on your page under a heading that says Press.
- Assemble the biography, photographs and credits into a folder or a single page.
- Create a short link on your own domain pointing at it, with a readable ending such as /press.
- Add it to the bio page, in its own section, below the sections fans use.
- Put the same short link in your email signature, so anyone who does write to you can help themselves.
The address stays the same while the contents change, which means the link in an article from two years ago still reaches the current kit.
Keeping it current
A press kit goes stale invisibly. Nothing looks wrong, and then somebody quotes a biography describing a project you finished three years ago.
Tie the update to something you already do. When a release goes out, update the one line biography in the same sitting. It takes a minute and it is the version most likely to be reprinted.
Check the photographs once a year. If you no longer look like them, they are working against you.
Knowing whether it is used
Because the kit sits behind a short link, you can see how often it is opened and from where.
That number is genuinely useful. If it is zero after a campaign, the link is buried or the press contacts you thought were interested were not. If it spikes the week before a piece runs, you know the kit did its job.
It also tells you when to bother updating it, which is more often than most people think and less often than perfectionism suggests.