How to Write a Sports-Related Press Release
Instructions
1 Gather all the pertinent facts about the sports news. This includes the team or individuals that are involved, the sporting event, the date and why the story is newsworthy.
2 Turn on your computer and open your word processing program. Create a new document.
3 Create the header of the press release. Include the team logo centered in the header if this is available. Be sure to start with your contact information aligned on the left margin with each bit of information having its own line: name, phone, email. Write “FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE” aligned on the left to draw the readers’ attention to this as being time-sensitive material.
4Write the title of the press release, centered with one line skipped between the contact information and the title. Use all capital letters in the title and give the gist of the information in this. Use a subtitle if you need to under the title, capitalizing only the first letter of each word. To include the following types of sport press releases: General, Game advance, Game review, Hometown, and Season Preview
5 Draft your body. There should be three main paragraphs, including the location and date (bolded), and stating the information that will grab an audience about the sports news. For example, you may want to state that the Local Tiny Tots have won the State Little League Championships and the town of Boca is having a parade in their honor.
In the second paragraph, include background information on the accomplishment. For example, you may want to state how the team got to this level and how far into the season it is. Include quote from key individuals (team captains, coaches or MVP).
The last paragraph should state the background of the team, including any previous successes, the coach’s bio and team/player profiles.
6 Write a contact paragraph. This isn’t part of the body of your press release and should be segmented by several spaces and a center marker, such as several pound signs or asterisks. Repeat the contact information, this time in sentence form.
7 Review your press release for grammatical and spelling errors to create the final copy, and then send it out to local newspapers, television stations and magazines by mail or fax. You can send it out by email, but don’t make this your primary method of distribution, because email is easily overlooked.
Types of Press Releases
Press releases are often lumped together as one single tool in PR writing or publicity. However, there are many different types of press releases, all with their own rules, formats, and other subtle differences in how they convey a message to members of the media.
General News Releases – General press releases are what most people think of when they think of press releases. A general press release simply includes news that needs to be disseminated to members of the media in the hopes of media coverage and exposure. For example, a general news release might be used if a company runs a contest, wins an award, or has some other general news about the company, organization, person, or website.
Pre- Season Releases – tend to follow the format of a general news release, but with a more specific function. Pre -Season releases have to carry an extra air or urgency or timeliness to generate buzz around the launch of some kind. Used to “hype” an up- coming season, players, & the team
Event Press Releases – Event press releases are often formatted differently than a general news release, because they need to very clearly lay out the who, what, when, where, and why, often in a list or outline form rather than laid out in paragraphs. As opposed to media advisories, which are intended to convince people to actually attend an event, event press releases are usually issued in hopes that the media will hype the event to the public.
Game reviews – are utilized to summarize the results of an event. This includes news that is disseminated to the public for informational and for persuasion, as to influence the activities of the potential consumer. An example would be a release that hypes the results of a contest to persuade a potential consumer to possibly attend future contests.
Hometown Releases – These are utilized to attract consumers from out of market areas to possibly attend events because of the association with a member of the team. An example would be to send a local interest release to a news agency in area that is a home town to one of the players. Keary Rouff, who is from Bradford, Pa. now attends and plays baseball for the Kansas Jayhawks. In his last game he hit for the cycle. This info would be transmitted back to the news agency in Bradford in order to generate local interest and possibly attract out of market consumers to come to his games.
