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Hook Check
Fourteen questions that tell you whether you have a story before you spend a dollar telling it. Answer them honestly and it hands you your headline. Or it tells you to go back and change the thing.
Free, no signup, works with the JavaScript off, prints on one page.
Take the thing you want covered. The launch, the hire, the number, the stunt. Run every attribute of it past these fourteen questions. Not the whole company. One attribute at a time, honestly, the way a stranger scrolling past you would.
You need one honest yes. Two is a campaign. Most lists come back four no dice and a getting there, and that isn't a failure. It's a starting position. You combine the survivors until one of them clears the bar.
The questions are older than the iPhone and never mention a channel. On purpose. They interrogate the idea, not the medium, and they have survived every platform shift since because of it. A story that clears them works on a front page, in a feed, and in the group chat where most sharing actually happens now. Because every stranger is a reporter today, filing to their own feed, and an algorithm decides what reaches them. A story that clears the fourteen satisfies both editors.
- NO DICE
- Not newsworthy. Too common, too promotional, too boring.
- INSIDE STUFF
- Real to your industry or your existing members. Not to anyone else.
- GETTING THERE
- Interesting. Not meaty enough on its own.
- STOP THE PRESSES
- The thing a journalist eats.
What to do with what you got
One or more stop the presses
Write the headline first, in their words, not yours. State the most interesting thing in as few words as possible and emulate an actual newspaper headline. The difference between local synagogue plans fundraiser to honor rabbi and rabbi recognized for lifetime of service is whose interests the sentence serves. A feed calls the same thing a hook. Write it once, it works everywhere. The rest of the release is support.
Two or more getting there
You have parts, not a story. Combine them into one tighter idea and run it through again. This is the step everybody skips, and it's the step that works. Two thin angles welded together clear the bar more often than either one polished alone.
Inside stuff, mostly
It's real to the people who already know you and invisible to everyone else. Send it to them. That's a good letter and a bad pitch. Then go find the thing about it that a stranger would repeat at a dinner table.
All no dice
There's no story in it yet, and finding that out now is the entire value of doing this. No amount of press release manufactures one. Change the thing, not the writing about the thing.
Hook Check is the free tool. Good Press is the whole system it comes from, published free: why a reporter behaves the way they do, the four reasons things spread, how to write it down, and the etiquette that keeps a good angle from dying against bad manners. Take it with you as a fillable PDF. Or hand me the thing and I'll run it: start something.
The fourteen questions and the four buckets are adapted from publicityinsider.com, in a document dated 2007. I didn't invent the questions, and I won't hide their age. The age is the credential. They have survived the death of the local paper, four platform eras, and the arrival of machines that write. What I built is the system they feed. It's called Good Press, and Hook Check is its first working tool. The receipts are underneath each part.