Writing the Great Gamer
One sentence or a whole essay, you can write more effective game highlight press releases that improve your ability to sell tickets and help the member clubs in your league do the same.
Brian ROSS
MLNSportsZone.com
We receive more than a hundred game releases a day on peak days from hundreds of teams in dozens of leagues.
Some clubs send us everything. Some send us home games only. Some send absolutely nothing other than promotional releases. You want to write up your game stories (gamers). All of them. Here's why.
Your away games are as important as your home stories. Fans follow you on the road on MLN, other news services, and on your league and team websites. You want people in the digital ether talking up your players, looking forward to seeing them in the away markets, and knowing that they are alive on the road in your home market. Whether your local fishwrap does a spectacular job or not, the sad truth is that they are reaching a shrinking audience, while publications like MLN are increasingly the voice of choice for specialty sports news.
Some of you have fifteen minutes after the broadcast to write anything at all, or you are working in facilities so aged that they don't afford an internet connection to send out anything. You think that you can't get out releases. Relax. We'll show you how!
Some of your game articles are great pieces of journalism. Others are briefs. More than a few forget pertinent pieces of information, like the score, or the opposing club's name. That's like having a circus with white panel vans, no tent and no advertising!
To elevate your exposure, and your member clubs exposure throughout the league, the game story is the center ring.
Ladies and Gentlemen...
If you want your stories read, with hundreds in our newswire, MLN - The Raw Feed, and thousands to scan on the web in places like Google News®, you need to catch the reader in less than a sentence. How?
Press Release 101
First, start with the basics:
- Your team's top featured players in the game;
- The date;
- The score;
- The full two team names - Search engines on the internet locate your stories better for readers when you use the club's full city/team name somewhere in the opening paragraph;
- Club records;
- The major highlight of the game;
- The name of the park, arena, or stadium;
- The attendance;
- The day or night of the game;
- The league name or class - If you can sneak it in, it helps trigger more results in search engines where people are looking for broader information;
- Players from the other team that are of note. Rivalries get started around a great visiting pitcher, a dominant center, or a defenseman whom the fans love to hate. All sports have an element of high drama. Accent it, and you will bring more fans in to fill seats on the nights these clubs and players show up.
Example: "WILMINGTON (WV) - November 11, 2006 - It came down to the last three seconds, but goaltender Jerry Puckstopper deflected a near-fatal shot from Bullies (5-1-0) bad-boy Brad Brighton to lift the Wilmington Wombats (2-4-1) 4-3 over local rivals the BayShore Bullies before a packed GNC Center crowd of 6,700 Friday night, ending a rollercoaster evening that saw power plays and penalties aplenty."
Yes, some owners and GMs will freak out at the mention of covering the other club's players. Remind them that it is good for business though, because establishing rivalries, feared or hated opponents, and showcasing MAJOR ATTITUDE players is good for ticket sales.
Visiting players only come over brief stands of time. That limited access to see them, or to experience the rivalry of your club and that particular visiting club, fills seats.
Many fans pick and choose the nights that they visit your club based on events, but as many like going on nights that the action gets more aggressive, the club with a winning record is in town, or the player who is on a record streak might see that milestone in front of them.
Keep press releases concise, and under 1500 words in length. Reader attention spans on the internet, one of the prime distribution points of news, are short. The better written gamers are usually only 500-700 words long.
Clear Subject Headline on Email
Some of you are creative with your subject lines on email. Others leave <no subject> at all. Many of you put PRESS RELEASE on everything, like digital ketchup. Imagine receiving and sorting hundreds of <no subject> and Press Release emails per night and having to have someone manually sift them out. It happens, but it can delay publication of your gamer by up to two days. It gets worse if the gamer has no score, or doesn't mention all of the key facts, because an editor has to manually check it word by word, delaying your story and others from other clubs.
Best subject lines include "GAME RECAP" as a heads-up to those on the other end. Also using terms like "Business Brief" for business stories, "Promotional" for promotionals, "Transaction" for transactions, "Preview" for pre-game notes, and "Schedule" or "Schedule Change" for those kind of briefs.
Remember that when you write past the local market, there are more than 700 operating professional franchises, including your league. Full team names in subjects help both register your news in places like Google and aids the copywriters working on your news to process them faster.
Sample: TUCSON TOADS TANK THE TEXAS TOROS 109-79 - NBA D-League Game Recap
Writing for Stupid Computers
With all of the noise out there, your press releases need to be easily found by the Internet search engines like GOOGLE®, Ask, MSN and Yahoo!, which crawl your words trying to serve them up to people who search for information.
- The complete names of both clubs should appear in a gamer before you get around to using their nicknames (E.g. Rochester Americans first, 'Amerks' anywhere after.).
- Remember that search engines aren't always smart enough to equate the nicknames with cities. Windy City and Chicago are two different things to sites like Google.
- Make sure that all of the names that a player is known by appear within the body of the text at some point. You can drop Anthony "White Chocolate" Gill as an introduction, then use Gill, White Chocolate, and Tony at other places in the story as needed. Google and other computers that crawl and index the text of web pages for information need these entire strings of characters in a full name to associate the story to your player.
- Spell-check and proof. Run your gamer through a word-processor or email program that flags spelling errors. It is better for you to catch them, because many news outlets just re-run what you put out.
Writing the Killer Lead
There are, at any given moment, close to 500 minor league and independent press releases a day beyond the 100 or so gamers circulating through our mailbox. How do yours stand out in that noise?
Writing a killer lead helps. Here is a real-world example of a release sent...
Continued...
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