Again, with thanks to Damien Mulley we present quite possibly the best example of Information Overload in a press release. It appears that an unnamed media organisation in Dublin passed a press release on to Damien (who apart from blogging intensively and organising the Irish Blog Awards amongst other things is also a journalist).

Unfortunately they forgot to turn off ‘track changes’ in Microsoft Word and the published release contained all the drafting edits that had been done to the document since it was created. My eyes hurt me trying to read the scan of the press release that Damien posted on his blog.. if you look closely enough I swear to you that you can see dolphins or a face or something buried in the text.

Why is this a trainwreck? The press release is garbage. The ‘foot in the door’ to news agencies who might cover the event was entirely ineffective. First impressions are important and the quality of information is ultimately affected by the quality of presentation of that information. A general rule of thumb is that if your head hurts trying to figure out what the actual information is in the midst of the ‘noise’ then it’s poor quality.

Update: To cap it all off, Damien makes clear in comments on this blog post that he shouldn’t have received the release in the first place as he is a Technology journalist, not a music journalist. Again, poor quality information contributing to a trainwreck press release being sent to the wrong person (who then put it up on his blog).