It’s a common PR conundrum – should you issue news on the day after a public holiday or push to wait another week? Reporters are on vacation on the Monday and may turn the weekend into a vacation, so availability is an issue. During the week prior to the long weekend, everyone has burning deadlines which impacts pre-pitching still further. Plus there’s the possibility that five days’ news will be condensed into four. Better to push the news back a week perhaps.
But then your pre-briefing time is shorter still since it falls on the four-day week. Plus, other companies are probably following the same logic, so delaying their announcements too – what if next week has twice the noise? Perhaps you should run counter-intuitively and go for the short week after all? Or bring it forward to before the holiday, though the chances of that are slim and that ramps the pressure still further to get things done in time.

So, given it’s Memorial Day (and a public holiday in the UK), can announcing news on the day after a public holiday be an advantage? Or should you play safe and push back a week?

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