One Link With Everything a Journalist Needs
Every account now has a press kit page, built automatically from material already on your site. One address, containing everything somebody writing about you or programming you is going to ask for.
What is on it
- Your short bio and your long bio, both copyable as plain text.
- Headshots at print resolution, downloadable, with photographer credit attached. See print-ready headshot downloads.
- Your reel, and any clips.
- Selected credits.
- Previous coverage, from your press page.
- Representation and press contact, from your contact details, and the market you are based in, from your contact page location.
Why the copyable bio is the part people appreciate
A journalist on a deadline needs 60 words about you. If they have to extract them from a stylized page, they will paraphrase, and the paraphrase will be worse and occasionally wrong.
Giving them 60 words, 150 words and a full biography, each with a copy control, means the version that gets published is the version you wrote. This is the single most effective thing on the page and it costs nothing.
Photographer credit travels with the photograph
Each downloadable image carries the credit line next to it and in the file's own metadata. Most headshot licenses require credit on publication and most published headshots do not carry it, usually because the person publishing never saw the requirement.
Who actually asks for this
Festivals, when you are in a selected film. Theaters, for a program and a front of house display. Journalists. Podcast producers. Award submissions. In every one of those cases the alternative is a scramble of emails and a folder of files, usually at the least convenient moment.
Control what is on it
The page is generated but not fixed. Every section can be switched off, and the headshots offered for download are the ones you have explicitly marked as downloadable rather than everything you have uploaded.
Keep the link somewhere findable
In your email signature, or at least somewhere you can find it in ten seconds. The value of a press kit is entirely in being able to send it immediately when somebody asks.
Related reading: the benefits of a press kit and the online press kit.
Create your free actor website and your press kit builds itself.
