The press release has a bad reputation it mostly earned. For every genuine announcement sent in the format, a hundred hollow ones go out dressed as news: a new hire nobody outside the company cares about, a partnership with no substance, an award the company essentially bought, all written in the stilted third-person voice that signals “ignore me” to any working journalist. Reporters have been trained by volume to delete most releases on sight. So the fashionable advice is that press releases are dead, and like most fashionable advice, it is half right in a way that will cost you if you believe it fully.
Press releases are not dead. Bad press releases are, and always were. The format still does real work for genuine news, and knowing when to use it, when to skip it, and how to write one that a reporter actually reads is a skill worth having. This is the complete guide, including the uncomfortable parts about when you should not send one at all.
When a press release actually earns its place
A press release does two jobs well and everything else badly. Understand the two jobs and you will stop misusing it.
The first job is announcing genuine news in an official, quotable form. When something real happens, a funding round, a significant launch, a major hire, a genuine milestone, a release gives every interested party a single authoritative source for the facts: the correct spelling, the exact numbers, the approved quotes. Reporters who decide to cover it can pull accurate details without chasing you. Partners can reference it. It becomes the record of what happened, stated the way you want it stated.
The second job is creating a durable, findable record. A release published on your own newsroom and distributed through appropriate channels becomes part of the searchable, citable history of your company. Search engines index it. AI systems can draw on it when someone asks about the event. It is the official version of the moment, preserved.
Notice what is not on that list: generating coverage on its own. A press release is not a pitch, and it does not persuade a busy reporter to write a story. That work is done by a personal pitch to a specific journalist. The release supports the announcement and the record. Expecting it to earn coverage by itself is the single most common way companies waste the format, and the disappointment that follows is what convinces them releases are dead.
When you should not send one
Here is the part most guides skip. Often the right number of press releases to send is zero, and sending one anyway does mild damage to your credibility with the reporters you most want to reach.
If the “news” is interesting only to you, it is not news, and a release announcing it tells every journalist on your distribution list that you do not understand the difference. A new website. A minor feature. A routine hire. An internal reorganization. Dressing these in the news format does not make them news. It marks you as a source who cries news, and reporters quietly discount your future releases accordingly. Credibility with journalists is a balance you can overdraw, and hollow releases are how companies overdraw it.
If your goal is coverage rather than record, skip the release and send a pitch instead. A short, personal email to a specific reporter proposing a story, with a real hook and a reason it matters now, will outperform a formal release for earning actual coverage almost every time. The release is a document. The pitch is a conversation. Coverage comes from the conversation.
And if you are tempted to send a release purely to get a link or hit a content quota, stop. That is exactly the behavior that trained reporters to ignore the format and that search engines have learned to discount. The releases worth sending are the ones you would send even if the only outcome were an accurate public record of something that genuinely happened.
How to write one that gets read
When you do have real news, the structure that works is old and unforgiving, and most releases fail at the first line.
The headline states the actual news in plain language, not a clever slogan. A reporter should understand what happened from the headline alone. “Company raises $12M to expand into European markets” beats any wordplay, because the reporter is scanning for substance, not admiring your copywriting.
The first paragraph delivers the core news completely: who, what, when, and why it matters, in a few sentences that could stand alone as the whole story. Journalists call this the lede, and the discipline is to put the most important fact first and never bury it. If a reporter reads only your opening paragraph, they should have the story. This also happens to be exactly what an AI system extracts, so leading with the clean facts serves both the human and the machine.
The body adds the supporting detail in descending order of importance: the context, the specifics, the numbers, the relevant background. Write it so it can be cut from the bottom without losing anything essential, because that is how it will be edited. A single genuine quote from a real person, saying something a person would actually say rather than corporate filler, adds a human voice the reporter can lift directly.
The boilerplate closes it: one consistent paragraph describing your company, the same one you use everywhere, so the facts stay uniform across every place the release travels. And the contact information is a real human with a real email, because a reporter with a follow-up question who hits a form or a no-reply address moves on.
Keep the whole thing to a page. If it runs longer, something in it belongs in a linked resource or a pitch, not the release. Brevity signals that you respect the reader’s time, which is itself a credibility signal in a format famous for wasting it.
Common press release mistakes
Even companies with genuine news manage to waste it, and the failures repeat often enough to catalog. Knowing them is faster than learning each the hard way.
The most common is the buried lede. The release opens with the company’s history, its mission, or a windup, and the actual news arrives in the third paragraph. Reporters scan the first line and move on before they reach it. The fix is brutal simplicity: the single most important fact goes in the first sentence, every time.
The second is the corporate voice. Releases written in stilted, promotional, third-person language, full of “thrilled to announce” and “committed to excellence,” signal to a reporter that there is no real story, only marketing. Write plainly, state facts, and let a genuine quote sound like a human actually said it. The more your release reads like a company talking about itself, the faster it gets deleted.
The third is no news hook. A release that announces something with no reason for anyone outside the company to care lands as spam. Before sending, force yourself to state, in one sentence, why a reporter’s readers would care. If you cannot, the problem is the news, not the writing, and no release will fix it.
The fourth is the wrong recipient. Blasting a release to a generic newsroom address or a bought list of hundreds of reporters who do not cover your space produces nothing but a reputation as a spammer. A release sent to the specific handful of reporters who actually cover your topic, ideally with a personal note, outperforms a blast to a thousand.
The fifth is treating the release as the whole strategy. The release is the official record and the source of facts. The pitch is what earns coverage. Companies that send a release and then wonder why no story appeared skipped the step that actually produces stories. Pair every newsworthy release with direct, personal pitches to the right reporters.
Avoid these five and you are ahead of most of the releases a journalist sees, which is a low bar that most companies still fail to clear.
Distribution, the record, and the machine
Where a release goes matters as much as what it says. Publish it first on your own newsroom, so the announcement builds your own domain’s authority and becomes part of the record you control. This is the version that should rank for your company and the event, and the one AI systems should find when they assemble an answer about it.
Then distribute directly to the specific reporters who cover your space, ideally alongside a personal pitch rather than as a cold blast. The release gives them the official facts; the pitch gives them a reason to care. A wire service can be worth using when you need wide, official distribution for genuine news, or a searchable record across many outlets, but treat it as a way to create an indexable record rather than as a coverage engine. Wire pickup that reprints your release verbatim is a record, not journalism, and everyone including the reader knows the difference.
There is a modern reason the record matters more than it used to. When someone asks an AI assistant about your company or a specific event, the system draws on the public record, and a clear, accurate, well-distributed release is part of what it reads. A genuine announcement, stated cleanly and preserved on your own site, helps the machine describe the event correctly. So even a release that earns no direct coverage still does quiet work, feeding an accurate record to the systems that increasingly answer questions about you.
The honest summary is this. Press releases are a specialized tool, not a marketing habit. Use them for genuine news, to create an accurate and findable record, and write them so a reporter can lift the facts in ten seconds. Skip them for everything else, and never let one substitute for the personal pitch that actually earns coverage. The companies that misuse the format taught the world to ignore it. The ones that use it correctly, sparingly and well, still get real value from it. Before you send your next release, ask one question: if no reporter ever covered this, would an accurate public record of it still be worth having? If yes, send it. If no, you were about to waste it.
The one-question test
If you remember nothing else from this guide, keep the single question that prevents the most wasted effort and the most self-inflicted credibility damage: if no reporter ever covered this, would an accurate public record of it still be worth having? That question sorts genuine news from vanity almost perfectly. A funding round, a real launch, a significant hire, a genuine milestone, honest data: yes, a record of these is worth having regardless of coverage, so a release is warranted. A website refresh, a routine promotion, a minor internal change: no, and a release announcing them only teaches reporters to ignore your name. Run every potential release through that test before you write a word. When the answer is yes, write it to serve the reporter’s reader, lead with the real news, keep it to a page, publish it on your own site to build the record, and pair it with a personal pitch to the specific reporters who cover your space. When the answer is no, save it, and protect the credibility you will need when you do have real news. The companies that misuse the format taught the world to delete press releases on sight. The ones that use it correctly, sparingly, honestly, and only for genuine news, still get real value from a format everyone else gave up on. That discipline, more than any writing trick, is what separates a release that lands from one that gets deleted.