Saturday, December 02, 2006

Press Release Mad Libs

I was reading a reprinted Caltech press release in Caltech News and it occurred to me that there's probably some skeleton document along the following lines that is used for most new press releases:


[School] Gets [fucking huge amount of money] from [acronym] to [verb] [scientific-sounding buzzword]

[Location]--[Organization] ([acronym]), a component of [another organization] ([acronym]), has awarded a [same fucking huge amount of money as above] grant for creation of a [name of research group] at [school].

According to [name of professor], the [name of benefactor] Professor of [subject] at [school] and principal investigator of the [time period] program, the goal will be to [verb] and [verb] every [scientific object] in [another scientific object]--that is, [terse definition of scientific object whose definition we learned in high school or earlier].

The work will be performed together with co-investigators [name of researcher] and [name of researcher] from the [department, division, or research group on campus], and [name of researcher], an assistant professor of [name of discipline] and [name of discipline].

"We will combine real-time analysis of [scientific thing] on a [size] scale with the ability to [verb] [plural noun] of interest," [name of principal investigator] says.

Initially, the research team will focus on [scientific noun that is much more specific than the one the team is getting money to study], which is ideal for this type of work because of [scientific thing] and its [another scientific thing].

"Our goal is to create [buzzword in single quotes]" [name of one of the other researchers] says. "This will be a computer model of [cheesy analogy] that transforms a/an [noun] into a/an [noun]."

"There will be an enormous payoff in new information about how [noun] works at the [scientific adjective] level," [name of principal investigator] adds.

The researchers will use new "[scientific buzzword]" imaging and [multi-word scientific adjective] tools invented by [name of investigator] and [name of investigator] and new [scientific adjective] methods being developed in the [name of investigator] lab to analyze [multi-word scientific noun] and [noun] in the [adjective] [plural noun]. They will digitize this [adjective] [noun] on a [adjective] scale by capturing [number] of time-lapse videos as the [plural noun] [verb].

Once the approach is worked out on [same test case as above], it will also be applied to the [slightly less trivial test case] to make a "[silly scientific buzzword]," because [adjective] [plural noun] [verb] in a fashion very similar to [what they are actually getting funding to study].

The [school] grant is part of a [large amount of money] grant portfolio awarded by the [original acronym] for funding interdisciplinary work in [scientific adjective] research. The [original acronym] is best known for spearheading the [multi-word scientific adjectve in capital letters] Project, which completely [verb; past tense] the [adjective] [noun] of [plural noun].

Now that the [noun] of the [noun] for [plural noun] and many other [plural noun] has been determined, the challenge ahead is to figure out how the [noun] [verb] during [noun] and [noun] which is the goal of the [yet another acronym] ([what this acronym stands for]) program.

"The [most recent acronym] program is vital to our efforts to apply innovative [adjective] tools and technologies to the study of [adjective] [name of discipline]," said [original acronym] Director [name]. "By fostering collaboration among researchers from many different disciplines, [original acronym] aims to encourage innovation and build a powerful new framework for exploring [adjective] [noun] and [noun]."


If you want to compare this to the original press release, go here.

And if you ever need to write your own press release, I suggest you start with the document here. With this in hand, you'll be well on your way to a career in public relations!

2 comments:

Lidarose said...

Thanks for getting my day off to a hilarious start! Watch out, though -- I bet the Caltech PR dept. is going to be all over your case for spilling the beans....

susan

Mason said...

I was considering using something like this for my April Fools 07 prank, but I think I'll have trouble getting this one on the Caltech website because the PR people might not appreciate it. (Or, at least, the Caltech employee who wrote the original might not like it, so I'd have to use an original from another school.) However, I already have a better idea, though I still have to think about how to make that one funny.