A 2019 analysis of corporate press releases by Fractl found that the average release contained at least one quote, and that most of those quotes were never reproduced anywhere. Reporters skim past them. The quote sits in the third paragraph, signed by a CEO, and says something like “We are thrilled to announce this exciting milestone.” Nobody has ever printed that sentence on purpose. Yet companies keep writing it, release after release, as if the quote were a tax they pay rather than the most reusable asset in the whole document.
Press release quotes are the one part of a release a journalist can lift word for word and drop into a story without rewriting. That makes them valuable. It also makes them the part most worth getting right, because a good quote does the reporter’s job for them, and reporters reward the people who make their job easier. Everything below is about closing the gap between the quote you tend to write and the quote a working journalist would actually keep.
Why most quotes die in the draft
The default corporate quote fails for a reason you can name. It carries no information. “We’re excited to bring this innovative solution to market” tells a reporter nothing they cannot already see from the headline. The facts of the news live in the body of the release. The quote is supposed to add something the facts cannot: a reason, a stake, a human read on why the news matters. When the quote just paraphrases the headline in a warmer voice, it is dead weight, and an editor trims dead weight first.
There is a test I give every client, and I call it the Quotable Test. Read the quote out loud, then ask: could a competitor have said this exact sentence about their own product? If yes, the quote is generic and a reporter will skip it. “We are committed to customer success” passes for any company on earth. “We rebuilt the checkout flow after watching forty users abandon carts at the shipping step” could only come from the team that did it. The second sentence survives because it is specific, sourced, and impossible to fake.
The other quiet killer is attribution by reflex. Companies sign every quote with the CEO because the CEO is the most senior name available. But seniority is not the same as authority on the subject. A reporter writing about a security feature wants the person who built it or decided to ship it, not a chief executive reading a line written by the communications team. The closer the speaker sits to the actual decision, the more a quote rings true, and the more a journalist trusts it enough to print.
The six rules that get a quote printed
Start with rule one: say something only you can say. Tie the quote to a decision your company made, a number you measured, or a tradeoff you weighed. Specificity is the whole game. Press release quotes that name a real choice (“we cut the onboarding from nine steps to three”) get used because they cannot be sourced anywhere else.
Rule two: sound like a human talking. Read the quote aloud. If you stumble, a reader will too. Drop the stacked adjectives and the phrase “we are pleased to.” People do not say “we are pleased to” in any other context, and the moment a quote sounds like a press release, the reporter remembers they are reading marketing.
Rule three: lead with the point, not the windup. The strongest quote opens on its sharpest idea. “Insurance has punished people for being honest about their health, and we built this to end that” lands harder than three clauses of context followed by the point. Reporters often print only the first sentence of a quote, so the first sentence has to carry.
Rule four: give the reporter a second source built in. When a customer or partner quote sits alongside the company quote, the reporter gets two voices for free, which means less work to verify and a more balanced story. A single internal quote forces them to go find an outside voice. A built-in second voice removes that friction.
Rule five: keep it to two or three sentences. The first makes a point. The second adds weight, ideally a number or a consequence. An optional third turns the idea forward without selling. Past three sentences, the reporter starts cutting, and they will not cut the way you would.
Rule six: never bury a fact inside the quote that should live in the body. If a number matters to the news, put it in the release text where it can be checked, then let the quote react to it. Quotes are for interpretation, not for smuggling in data that needs verification.
Build the quote on a spine
Here is a structure I hand to clients so they stop staring at a blank quote field. I call it the Quote Spine, and it has three vertebrae. The first sentence states a position or a tension. The second sentence grounds that position in something measurable or concrete. The third, when you use it, points forward to what changes now. Position, proof, direction. Most strong press release quotes you have ever read follow this shape even when the writer did not plan it.
Watch it work. Position: “Small clinics have been priced out of the analytics tools that big hospital systems take for granted.” Proof: “We spent eight months rebuilding ours so a two-person practice pays under a hundred dollars a month for the same dashboards.” Direction: “If a solo physician can finally see their own no-show patterns, fewer appointments get wasted and more patients get seen.” Three sentences, one voice, zero filler. A health reporter can lift that whole thing and the story is half written.
The spine also protects you from the most common failure mode, which is a quote that is all direction and no proof. “We’re building the future of healthcare” is pure direction with nothing underneath it, so it floats off the page. Anchor every forward-looking claim to a concrete second sentence and the quote stops sounding like a slogan. Direction without proof is a slogan. Proof plus direction is news.
Match the speaker to the story
Choosing who speaks is half of writing a usable quote. The instinct to default to the founder is strong, and for a funding announcement or a company-direction story the founder is genuinely the right voice. But for a product release, the person who led the product carries more authority. For a hire, the team they are joining. For a research finding, whoever ran the study. Reporters can smell a quote that was assigned to a name rather than spoken by them, and a mismatched speaker is one of the loudest tells.
There is a practical upside too. When you quote the right internal expert, you also tee up your media outreach, because that person becomes the reporter’s natural follow-up interview. A quote from your head of engineering invites the reporter to call your head of engineering. A quote from a CEO who cannot actually go deep on the topic sets up an interview that disappoints. The quote and the spokesperson should be the same person whenever the story is technical.
A quick before-and-after
Take a real-feeling example. The weak version: “We are excited to announce our new AI feature, which represents a major step forward in our mission to serve businesses.” It says nothing, it could belong to any company, and it leans on empty buzzwords that signal marketing. Now rebuild it on the spine. “Most teams using our tool were copying answers into a spreadsheet by hand, so we automated the part they hated. In a three-week test with forty accounts, that step went from twenty minutes a day to none. The point was never the AI, it was giving people their afternoon back.”
The second version names a real behavior, attaches a measured result, and ends on a human read. It is the kind of quote a reporter keeps because it is doing reporting for them. The difference is not talent. It is structure plus specificity, applied on purpose. If you write every press release quote through the Quotable Test and the Quote Spine, you will stop producing sentences that exist only to be skipped.
Write the quote you would actually want to read in a story about your own company. Then cut the first clause, because it is almost always the windup, and ship what is left.