There must be a reason

With every preparation of a show, here comes the moment every young curator dreads the most: sending the Press Release.

If you don't have the luck (or funds) of having a proper Press Office doing it for you, then be prepared for a good deal of stress which will probably end up in calling the computer every name under the sun or, more politely, putting your hands in your hair not exactly to pull them out, but to prevent them from falling off.

Too melodramatic? In the end it's not a big deal, is it? It's just about sending some emails... well, there must be a reason why people study hard to become Press Officers.

First of all, dealing with the press means tight deadlines, well in advance of the event, which can't be ignored; therefore you need to squeeze your brain out and get the press release done before that date. If you have the writer's block or suffer from chronic perfectionism, you're screwed.

Once everything is nicely ready, the image is in place in the email's body, the writings make sense - not too boring, not too long - and the timing is right, you suddenly realise that you can't send it at once to all your contacts. Most of the on-line email servers now have anti-spam filters activating themselves as soon as you try to go over, say, two-hundred emails per day - Two Hundred! Wow, you have a hell of a mailing list! - OK, people don't like spam and that's a fact, but there is a difference between selling Viagra and informing about an upcoming show... I am sure these spam filters, which must have been devised from the CIA's greatest geeks, are aware of the email's content.

How do you solve this? By splitting your contacts in not too large groups. Ype, but this takes half of your day. Moreover, you can be the most organised and precise person in the world... there will always be a skipped, forgotten or even added twice contact ending up in the wrong group. Like That Gallery Director getting, together with the show invitation, a personal message saying: "Hello dude! Hope to see ya there!" Face it: you're not Superman.

After having tried to pull your eyes, that have started twitching, together, you are ready to press the 'Send' button. Read it again.
Adjust that double space.
Add something.
Delete something.
Wait! Don't forget to add the Bcc otherwise every contact will see everyone else's email and they are going to hate you.
Ah! Add the disclaimer, too. Explain to people why they are getting this email, that you are blah blah, rules about privacy, blah blah blah and that, if they don't want to receive such information anymore, they can unsubscribe.
Put your email in the "To" field, so you can monitor everything.
Done. Take a breath... Send.

Aaaaah, first batch gone, you start to relax and even to feel smug. Piece of cake! You receive the email that you have just sent to yourself and...instead of the image, there is a nice blue square with a question mark in it. What the hell? Simple: the image has jumped. That's when you start to loose it because you just have informed a group of people of a show about a work that they can't see. And it's not just any group, like "Friends" who will definitely understand: it's "Press". This doesn't really help.

To avoid repeating the embarrassing mistake, you start all over again, create a new fresh email, re-add the image, and avoid the "Forward" button like the plague. This, for five or six times minimum, depending on how many "Groups" you have. In the mean time, is 1.59 am and you have been at it all day. Well, at least it's done. Life is beautiful!

The day after, you open your email account to finish sending the invite to the rest of your contacts - you were clever enough to keep the ones not subject to deadlines for the day after because the spam filters have indeed blocked you. - Among the many "Out of Office" auto-reply and failure notices because you typed 'hitmail' instead of 'hotmail', what do you find?
A couple of "Unsubscribe". Like this. No reason given.

Well now, after all you have been through!