“If it is not news, it is not a press release, it is a flyer.” A PR mentor told me that years ago, and it remains the most useful thing anyone has said about the format, because the thing that kills most press releases is not the writing but the absence of actual news. Editors can smell a company announcing something only the company cares about, and the moment they do, the release is deleted regardless of how polished it is. So before we talk about what a press release is and how to build one, understand that the format is a delivery mechanism for news, and if you have no news, the format cannot save you.
What is a press release? It is a short, structured document that announces something newsworthy to journalists in a factual news style, built so a reporter can grasp the story fast and decide whether to cover it. It is two things at once: a pitch that says “here is a story worth your time,” and a ready-made news brief that hands the reporter the facts they would need to write it. That dual purpose shapes everything about the format. A press release is not an ad, not a blog post, and not a company update memo. It is a tool for getting a journalist from “what is this” to “I can cover this” in under a minute, and every part of it exists to speed that trip.
Why most press releases fail before they are read
A journalist at a real publication receives dozens to hundreds of pitches a week, and they triage them in seconds, because they have to. Your press release is competing for a sliver of attention against every other release in the inbox, and the decision to keep reading or delete happens in the first sentence or two. Most releases lose right there, not because the news is bad but because the opening buries it. The release opens with the company’s name, its boilerplate mission, a windup about the industry, anything but the actual news, and the journalist deletes it before reaching the point. The failure is structural: the news is present but not up front, so it never gets seen.
The second common failure is that there is no news to find. A huge share of press releases announce things that matter only to the company sending them: a minor feature, a routine hire, a rebrand nobody asked about, a partnership with no consequence. The journalist reads the opening, correctly concludes there is no story for their audience, and moves on. No format fixes a missing story. This is why the honest first step in writing a press release is deciding whether you actually have news, and being willing to conclude that you do not, because sending a release about a non-story trains editors to ignore your next one, which might be real.
The third failure is writing the release as marketing rather than news. Journalists write in a factual, restrained style, and a release dripping with promotional adjectives, “revolutionary,” “game-changing,” “world-class,” reads as advertising, which reporters discount instantly. A press release that sounds like a news brief the reporter could almost publish as-is respects how they work and makes their job easier. A press release that sounds like a billboard makes them do the work of stripping out your hype to find the facts, and most will not bother. The style is a signal: news style says you understand the medium, marketing style says you do not.
The 7-part release skeleton
Here is the framework, and I call it the 7-part release skeleton, because a working press release is not freeform, it is seven specific parts in a specific order, each doing a job. The seven parts are the headline, the dateline, the lead, the body, the quote, the boilerplate, and the contact. Miss one and the release has a hole a journalist will notice. Get all seven right and the reporter has everything they need to evaluate and write the story without a follow-up email. The skeleton is not decoration. It is the set of things a journalist expects to find, arranged so they find each one where they look for it.
The headline and the lead carry almost all the weight, because they are what the journalist actually reads before deciding. The headline states the news in plain, specific terms, no cleverness, just what happened, so the reporter knows the story from the subject line alone. The lead, the first sentence of the body, delivers the full news in one tight sentence: who did what, when, and why it matters. This is the inverted pyramid that news writing runs on, most important information first, and it is non-negotiable for a press release, because the reporter reads top-down and stops the moment the news fails to justify continuing. If your headline and lead do their job, you have earned the next ten seconds. If they do not, the other five parts never get read.
The remaining parts support the decision the headline and lead prompt. The dateline sets the where and when. The body expands the news with the supporting facts, the context, the numbers, in descending order of importance so the reporter can stop anywhere and still have the story. The quote gives a human voice, ideally saying something substantive rather than a canned platitude, because a real quote is usable and a hollow one gets cut. The boilerplate, a short standard paragraph about your company, answers “who are these people” without hijacking the news. The contact makes it trivial for an interested reporter to reach you, which sounds obvious and is astonishingly often bungled. Seven parts, each small, each expected, together forming a document a journalist can act on.
Writing each part so it works
Write the headline as if it were the news article’s own headline, factual and specific, because that is how the journalist reads it. “Company X raises $12M to expand its veterinary telehealth network” tells a reporter the story instantly. “Company X announces exciting new milestone” tells them nothing and reads as filler. The test is whether someone could know your news from the headline alone. If they cannot, the headline is doing PR-speak instead of news, and it will lose the reader before the lead gets a chance. Specificity is the whole job of the headline, and vagueness is where most of them die.
Write the lead to survive being the only sentence read, because it often is. Pack the full news into that first sentence, then let the body unpack it. A reporter who reads only your lead should be able to decide whether to cover the story, which means the lead cannot depend on the paragraphs below it to make the news clear. This is the same self-contained discipline that AI extraction rewards, and it is not a coincidence, because a lead written to stand alone for a busy reporter is also a lead an AI engine can lift cleanly when it cites your announcement. The clarity that serves the journalist serves the machine, which matters more now that press releases feed AI answers as well as human coverage.
Write the quote to be worth quoting. The default quote in most releases is a hollow line from an executive saying they are thrilled and excited, which reporters cut because it carries no information. A quote that says something real, a specific claim, a genuine insight, a concrete reason the news matters, survives into the coverage and does work for you. Treat the quote as a chance to put a usable, substantive sentence in the reporter’s hands, not as a formality to fill. And keep the whole release to a page, because the journalist decides fast and a release that runs long signals you do not understand how they read. Everything essential fits on one page. Discipline about length is itself a signal that you respect the reader’s time.
What a press release is really for now
The audience for a press release has widened, and it changes how you should think about the format. It used to be aimed at one reader, the journalist, and its only job was to earn coverage. It still does that, but a well-built release now also gets indexed, syndicated, and read by AI engines that cite announcements when they answer questions about companies and their news. The clear, factual, self-contained writing that wins a reporter is the same writing an AI engine grounds on, so a strong press release earns human coverage and machine citation from the same document. The format did not change. Its reach did, and the releases built to news standards are the ones that travel to both audiences.
That widened reach raises the value of getting the fundamentals right rather than lowering it. A release with real news, built on the seven-part skeleton, written in news style, and kept to a page, works harder than ever, because it can earn a placement, seed syndicated pickups, and become a source an AI engine cites about your company. A release with no news, buried lead, and marketing puffery fails across all of those channels at once. The discipline is the same discipline it always was: have real news, put it up front, write it like a journalist would, and make it easy to act on. Do that, and the press release remains one of the most efficient tools you have for turning something you did into something the world hears about.