How Not to Write a Press Release

The Lutheran World Federation provides one of the sorriest examples of a press release I’ve seen in, oh, perhaps a week. 

The lead sentence (rambling on for thirty-nine words) starts off:

A group of theologians, ethicists, anthropologists and staff working on adaptation and mitigation measures related to climate change, are calling for the Lutheran communion’s global solidarity with vulnerable communities that are acting to address the impact of climate change.

I can see news editors everywhere straining to get this in print ahead of a competitor, betcha. 

The entire release has 583 words. “Climate” and “change” take up four percent. Combining “climate” and “change” with such phrases as “victims of,” “analyses of,” “redress of,” “redressing,” “impact of,” “affected by,” “effects of,” and “related to” constitutes nine percent of the release, a soggy cliché-ridden piece of eww-yuck journalism. 

Besides, the whole thing reads like a socialist-workers-paradise formula story, where all the right words must all be fitted in exactly the right order.

I’m just taking it apart from the vantage of one news writer looking at another’s work. But as to content, reacting only as a reader, well, honest, if there is anything that scares me more than climate change, it’s a group of theologians, ethicists, anthropologists, and staff getting together to work on climate change.