I receive many notices from art organizations and galleries which masquerade as press releases. Today I received a press release from an fairly well established gallery. The email was without a subject line. There was no content in the body of the email, it wasn’t addressed Dear Lisa or Dear Press Editor, and there was simply an attachment without explanation. This happens a lot. I hit delete.

Sometimes I get two, three or even four emails from the same organization in the course of a week . . . sometimes even within 24 hours. I generally stop reading at this point because they are approaching spam. One of the first things I learned in PR was . . . Don’t piss off the press!  No one benefits from this. As such, I thought it might be time to take a look at the proper way to write and distribute a press release.