Congratulations! As a whole, ski area press kits are definitely better than they were when I wrote a jaundiced review of them in the July 1985 Ski Area Management. Unfortunately most are still fatter than they need to be. And they still arrive too late (September and October, instead of May and June) and without essential ingredients (trail maps, price lists and lodging directories).
Maybe area promotion people are heeding the advice in a critical analysis of 66 press kits published in the March 1992 SAM. Maybe press kits are better because they are increasingly produced by professional area personnel or public relations agencies that understand skiing.
Last summer, Winter Park, Colo., pioneered the art of the press-kit-on-a-diskette, put inside its conventional press kit. “Our computer department came up with a kit that can be read by many programs,” said Julie Klein, media coordinator of the Colorado resort. Ten years ago, who had computers, let alone computer departments, that could do this?
The future may be electronic dissemination of press kits which is already available. Jay Melnick’s Colorado Travelbank, which began in Denver as a computerized resource for consumers, last year sent ski area press kits via modem, for free, on request, to 397 journalists around the U.S. Areas such as Aspen, Crested Butte, Steamboat, Winter Park and New Mexico’s Angel Fire, had sent in diskettes containing all the kit copy, paying $500 to $1000 to be in Melnick’s Electronic Press Release data bank. Writers were able to download data, any time of day, straight into their own computers. Areas could update their data, thus short-stopping writers from using information that might have changed since the hard-copy kits were mailed. (Colorado Travelbank, 303-320-8550)
Technology has also given us order-a-photo guides, allowing writers to choose black-and-whites from a sheet of miniatures. It is not, however, as handy as getting sharp black-and-white prints captioned with the names of each person in the photograph and the trail on which the photo was shot. But it is better than receiving a half-dozen unidentified color slides. (Hint: color prints are preferred by many color-using newspapers and can often be converted to black-and-white by papers that can’t use color, still the majority.) Still, there is a lot of useless stuff in press kits that I suspect is sent out because most PR people do not know what the press actually uses.
The Stowe kit is one of the few to include information about the resort’s long history and interesting ownership. Sunday River, Me. is another that throws in a company history and the kind of business data that might inspire a non-ski business story.
But most ski areas present themselves as history-less orphans. In fact, many writers, and possibly readers, would like a few facts about “the ski company” and how it got that way.
Like most writers and editors, I am my own file clerk and must cram these ever-growing kits into the same too-small drawer. I am grateful for kits that come with the same distinctive color or artwork every year and/or covers bearing tabs on which are imprinted the area’s state as well as name.
But it’s the contents that count, and the more basic, the more useful.
Each fall, skiers, and therefore ski writers, want to know two things about a ski area: what’s new and how much will it cost the customer.
Winter Park, reports that its most widely picked up release is a calendar of events. Fine. Send me a calendar. Send me a fact sheet complete with length, vertical drop and capacity of lifts; details of snowmaking coverage; basic prices; hours; non-ski facilities; accommodations; access. Send me the brochure that will be provided to skiers. It’s the area’s letter to the world and I better know what it says.
Above all, send the area trail map. What, it’s not ready when press kits go out? Okay. So send me last year’s map clearly labeled with the year and with a note indicating changes, additions, and news for next year — or that the map will be virtually the same.
Dispensable: cover letters, tables of contents, pages die-cut to be of different sizes, releases bound in booklet form. The ultimate disposable: canned features (“Mount Mountain Loves Families”) unrelated to what real-life travel and ski editors actually print. In theory, they plant ideas for stories; in practice, they fly straight into the waste can.
Double-spaced releases, written on only one side of the paper used to be mandatory for editorial handling. Now they are old-fashioned, signaling that the area is not really conservation-minded.
