The Mining Business Digest receives hundreds of news releases over the course of a year. Many are well written and ready for a quick edit and insertion into the Digest. Many are obtuse and difficult to get the real news out of, many don’t say anything or repeat old news, others are downright indecipherable - those are the ones editors just can’t be bothered with and hit the circular file. If you want your news release to get published with as little editing as possible, here are some tips.

(1) Pack sentences with relevant information without making them difficult to read. There is nothing wrong with long sentences or splitting you infinitives as long as the sentence flows and provides relevant information. Read it to yourself out loud.

(2) Don’t use meaningless adjectives and descriptions. Don’t use meaningless adjectives like "large", "extensive", "widespread", "massive" and the like without giving an indication of how large, how extensive, etc. Use real dimensions or forget it. Large to you might not be large to anyone else, give dimensions. Pack sentences with useful information and edit out the fluffy stuff.

(3) Avoid drivel like our Mighty Big gold prospect is 12 miles south of the massive deposit of XYZ Major mining company. It has no relevance unless there is some geologic connection with the XYZ Major mining company’s deposit and is obvious fluffing.

(4) Attach tables of drill hole results and long resource/reserve tables at the end of the NR. Don’t clutter up the text with anything but summary tables.

(5) Remember your audience. Are you writing the NR for industry executive peers? The exploration community? Or for brokers and investors?

(6) There is an agonizing tendency for NR writers to try to write prose to astound and astonish the reader. There is, as far as we know, no Pulitzer Prize for news release writing. Simplify, simplify, simplify. Don’t use "commence" when "begin" will do. Don’t use ‘expend" when "spend’ will do.

(7) Even if you have previously written NRs for a project, always provide precise project locations - reference them as X miles (kms) from some nearby town. Avoid 500 kms south of Hermosillo, for example. What does that say?

(8) If a NR is more than 1-1/2 pages long, provide a concise summary up front. Bulleted or numbered items are helpful. There is nothing more depressing to an editor than to get four pages of single-spaced geologic descriptions and assay data knowing that he has to condense that to two or three paragraphs. Your story will not get out the way you want it without a summary.

(9) Provide averages and or ranges for large volumes of drill hole intercept data or samples. An editor looking at a page of drill hole intercepts and trying to figure out what it really means will nine times out of ten, not interpret the data what you want him to. Always note inclination of drill holes.

(10) Get a good grammar handbook and grammar checker and spell checker - and use it.

Oh, and don’t forget to place your company name in the headline and in the first line of the NR.

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