Late press releases could ruin chances for publicizing your events

Since Friday afternoon, I’ve gotten over half a dozen press releases or Facebook invitations for interesting events happening next weekend — July 10th through 12th.

Seriously, these are all interesting things — potentially good live music gigs, openings of art shows, and the like.

But I’m left wondering if the organizers really want to get any press or if they just have no idea what kind of deadlines area journalists have to meet.

My Unplugged (formerly Man About Town) columns in Thursday’s Do in the Savannah Morning News are typically submitted on Monday morning. That means I’m corresponding no later than midday Friday with the Do editor to see what potential topic isn’t already being covered in another column or article. Sometimes we correspond earlier in the week — sometimes a full 10 days before the print edition of the newspaper comes out.

I do not know the precise deadlines for Connect Savannah, but the alt-weekly has a small staff and has all the new week’s content on their website at noon each Tuesday. Given the time needed for information gathering, writing, and editing, they would obviously be working several days ahead.

To receive late notice of so many interesting events is especially problematic in the summer. Since Do has beefed up its content and added contributors, we are actually well-poised to handle the busiest weeks on the cultural calendar. The second week of July is not one of those weeks, trust me.

So pretty much any type of opening or show would have a fair chance of getting significant publicity this week, if we writers received timely information.

I can’t even begin to say how frustrating it is when

• people assume that local reporters and columnists will just magically know about everything that’s going on,
• organizers of events put countless hours into planning but put almost no time into promoting them,
• and promoters wait till the very last second to try to get press without even realizing that they have waited till the last second.

So if you have something you want to promote, get your act together and let the local media know about it in time for us to do something.

This is not rocket science.