Please join the rest of us in the 21st century

About a year and a half ago, at my day job, I railed against companies that snail-mail press releases.

Don't waste money mailing dead trees

The amount of dead-tree matter landing in my inbox has diminished significantly, yet I still received the occasional paper press release.

Most PR professionals understand that media outlets want e-mail, not bits of paper, to work with. But many companies don't hire PR professionals; they ask a secretary or some other person who doesn't understand the media to send out a press release.

I often get phone calls from these folks, because they don't know what a press release is, exactly, or what it should contain. The ones who call are a step ahead of the ones who don't, because they at least learn the e-mail lesson.

The ones who don't send me a piece of paper that winds up in a file that's not part of my e-queue, and so halve their chances of exposure.

So here's a shout-out to all you non-PR-professionals who get yanked into PR duty because there's no one else at your company to do it: E-mail. Plain text. Really.