There's a neat web service for checking to see if your Press Release is full of #!*! or if it carries standard elements such as contact numbers, URL's and keywords that match up with links.
It's called Press Release Grader. A cut-and-paste site that grades your release instantly.
What I liked most about it was the visual rendering of a Word Cloud, which displays words larger if they are used more often etc. It also points to gobbledygook words -there were 7.
Since Apple's iPhone 2.0 is all the rage this month, I used one of the first iPhone releases from January 2007 about 'reinventing the phone.' It got a grading of 44 out of 100, and had the readability level for a 3-year undergraduate.
You can see the report here.
I don't think the value of this is to score high, or to gloat, but to get you to understand what you could be missing, or overdoing. What constitutes a perfect press release? No human or piece of software could tell you that. There are guidelines and must-haves that a 'Grader' like this will help you remember to use. But as my friend and author Linda VandeVrede reminds us, a press release should serve the one audience it is targeting: the media.
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