Ah ha, caught you, didn’t I? You started to blurt out an answer, then stopped. I know I did, when I read a “Big Idea” post on FastCompany with the provocative title, “Text messaging has become a likely alternative to traditional media releases.”

Barack Obama will announce his vice-presidential running mate on Twitter. People who follow Obama on Twitter will be the first to learn who will round out the Democratic ticket (including journalists). Who needs a press release?

Obama’s move is great on a number of levels, but I’ve no doubt the Obama campaign will still issue a release articulating all the right talking points. So, I thought to myself, a Twitter-first strategy isn’t really an alternative to a news release, because a news release is…

And I stopped.

To define what a news release is today, it’s useful to revisit what it used to be. There are three important points to keep in mind:

• The publics organizations wanted to reach relied on mainstream media to deliver content. There was no “pull.”
• There were two ways to get a message out through the mainstream media: Buy it (advertising) or earn the coverage (PR).
• Journalists—the gatekeepers—had limited channels through which they could receive organizations’ news: phone, fax, wire services, the postal system and (more recently) email.

News releases worked all the way around. Organizations could distribute them by fax, wire service, the mail and email. Reporters learned about news to cover and got a kick-start on their reporting. Publics had access to this information. (Yes, a lot of what was and is communicated in press releases is crap. But a lot of useful and important news and information has also been conveyed in press releases.)

Fast-forward to today. To begin with, the publics organizations want to reach are made up of individuals who are able to choose one or several channels to receive information. They can choose what to read and they are not forced to rely on any single medium or gatekeeper to get it.

The media are not limited to old channels for story leads or research. A study by Brodeur revealed a growing reliance on blogs by journalists as sources of information.

Finally, organizations are not limited to the media in order to convey information and make announcements.

But—and here’s the kicker—organizations still have to communicate news and information and there are people who still have an interest in knowing what that news and information is.

So, in this environment, what is a news release? It is not any one thing. There is no single bolt-from-the-sky alternative; you can’t “kill traditional releases and just blog it.”

I submit that a news release is the communication of an organization’s news or other announcements through all appropriate channels in a transparent manner using tools that work in harmony and open the door to further conversation on the information released.

Let’s say, for example, you’re announcing a new product line. A news release would include…

• Blog posts from the CEO, the brand manager, and anybody else in the company that has a perspective on the news.
• A tweet of the news through appropriate Twitter accounts, including any “official” company account as well as employees who have established themselves as company representatives (think RichardatDell). The official company tweet can include a link to the authoritative statement of record, while the tweets of the individual employees can link to their own blog posts.
• It most likely happens as a matter of course, but the company’s official RSS feeds should include the announcement. All content—from individual blogs to traditional press releases—should be distributed by RSS.
• Any company podcasts can include interviews or other appropriate content related to the product. The show notes can link to other content, including, for example, the brand manager’s blog posts if the brand manager was the interview guest.
• Company pages on social networks like Facebook can be updated as appropriate.
• A traditional press release crosses the “wires” for inclusion in places like Yahoo! News and Google News. Mainstream journalists—particularly in smaller markets and trade publications—can also make good use of worthwhile, well-crafted releases.
• Appropriate multimedia should be uploaded to company channels on media sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr. This could be a general company channel or one dedicated to the brand, if the launch is a big enough deal. You can link to any of these assets in tweets and blog posts.
• Establish a Delicious account or two (or more) to house links to related content and/or coverage of the announcement
• Create a social media release

This is not a comprehensive list, of course; there are other channels I haven’t mentioned that could be entirely appropriate, depending on the news and the audience. New channels are opening up all the time. But the core idea is to release the news through all the channels the public and journalists use to receive and share it. (Note there is no pitching involved in any of this. Whether pitching is done well or badly, or should even be called “pitching,” t’s still a separate activity from the release of news itself.)

I remain committed to the social media release because of the role it plays in the symbiotic world of the multi-channel news release. It is the one source that contains everything else. The social media release is one-stop shopping, an aggregator of all content related to the news, organized in a digestable, objective, and usable format. If you read the tweet and want more information, where do you go? If you read the CEO’s blog and want more details on the product, where do you go? If you get the news because you’re a friend of the company’s Facebook page and want more information, where do you go? That’s the role the social media release fulfills.

So the news release is no longer a single thing, nor can any single thing ever accomplish what the traditional release used to. The biggest objection most PR practitioners will raise is thats a multi-channel release takes a lot more work. That’s true. But even some old-guard newspapers, like the Spokane Spokesman Review, are figuring out that tweets, blog posts, and traditional reporting are all now part of a news continuum.

So no, a text message is not an alternative to a news release. It’s part of one.