Whenever I teach beginning newswriting, I always spend a day or two on PR. My favorite moment in those lessons is looking at their faces when I tell them that 95% of the quotes in press releases are made up.
This is troofax.
I can’t tell you how many quotes I write for our SMEs. Now, there are some who decide to rewrite them, but basically, when new policy comes out, we decipher the meaning, attempt to turn it into plain English and often write quotes to support the story. However, it’s going through the SME for fact-checking. Just as often as we write the quotes, they wind up changing some of the content.
I find it funny how often they let our quoted material go unchanged but will wordsmith the shit out of some esoteric detail that everyone but their bosses will overlook.
