As a journalist in the computer press, I received sometimes 40 press releases in a single day. Since I am an information junkie I did not view this as a negative; the more possibilities of topics I had to write about—and file away for future reference and “enterprise” stories—the better.
Yet I did enforce one, simple rule: if I could not understand what product or service the sender was pitching after reading four paragraphs, into the bit bucket it went.
Grabbing attention is probably the most difficult job of marketing and advertising, and knowing how to do that is the sixth sense that separates the masters from the wannabes.
A good story must start with a good sentence. From there, the path is instinctually obvious.
