How The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center restructured the way it presents information.
Last fall, researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center had big news to share: cancer patients who received an mRNA COVID vaccine prior to starting immunotherapy treatment had significantly better outcomes than those who didn’t, according to their study.
While the researchers planned to promote their findings at a conference in Europe and paper published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature, the PR team at UT MD Anderson also wanted to make a splash. Their aim: spread the news as far and wide as possible, while avoiding controversy and making the information easy for laypeople to understand.
One way the PR team did so was by reformatting the related press release for a media environment where both reporters and consumers are using AI platforms to both discover and summarize information.
“We’re constantly trying to think about how we can highlight the research in ways that’s going to engage more with reporters, with the public and make the research more visible,” said Clayton Boldt, director of public relations at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
Below, Boldt explains the thinking behind each section of UT MD Anderson’s reformatted press release.
Opening bullet points
After the title, the press release opens with three bullet points explaining the main takeaways in a succinct manner.
The first one reads: “Cancer patients who received mRNA COVID vaccines within 100 days of starting immunotherapy were twice as likely to be alive three years after treatment as those who never received a vaccine.”
The next two state these findings have prompted more research and that, if validated, the outcome could potentially benefit more patients who undergo this treatment.
Boldt said many reporters are uploading press releases into LLMs to get a summary anyway, so this format helps guide the results they get back.
Knowing reporters are also short on time, Boldt described this section as essentially a “TL;DR version of the press release.”
The basic facts
The next section, which includes three paragraphs — one a quote from a researcher — covers the basic facts of what happened. It features a clear timeline of when the study occurred and names the researchers behind it.
The quote puts the study’s conclusion and implications in plain language: “This study demonstrates that commercially available mRNA COVID vaccines can train patients’ immune systems to eliminate cancer,” said Adam Grippin, a senior resident in Radiation Oncology at UT MD Anderson.
“A lot of times the quote can get buried if it’s just a long article,” Boldt said about the flow of more traditional press release. Organizing content into distinct sections, he added, helps each aspect pop out more, since the format encourages readers to jump around rather than start from the beginning and read through.
Questions and answers
The final section contains four question-led headings followed by multiple-paragraph answers. They cover the topic more broadly, each focused on a specific viewpoint.
The first question asks, “How was this association discovered?” Another asks, “What are the major implications of this discovery?”
The purpose of this section, Boldt explained, was to organize the information in a way that was clear and concise, yet also easy to skim if someone was more interested in one question than another. In this way, it once again deviates from a more conventional press release that presents everything in block after block of text.
“A reporter can dig in as much on the context as they want to, but that allows us to get what we think is going to be the key information for people, for different audiences,” said Boldt about this section.
Experts agree that when surfacing information, AI platforms tend to gravitate toward websites with strong opening sentences, question-led headings and clear, direct answers in FAQ sections.
“We know that if a study doesn’t get covered now, six months or a year down the road somebody might be researching this topic and we want this to come up in those answers,” said Boldt.
The result
The creative approach to presenting information paid off, according to Boldt, resulting in some of the most widespread coverage the institution has ever received for a single research study.
Boldt noted UT MD Anderson’s PR team secured news coverage in nearly every major media outlet across the country, including Reuters, The Associated Press and The Washington Post. Total media placements exceeded 1,500. Anecdotal feedback suggests the new format helped journalists better understand the topic, too.
Overall, the press release generated more than 54,000 visits to UT MD Anderson’s newsroom website.
Boldt used just two words to sum it up: “phenomenal success.”
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