Most press releases are never read. Not skimmed and rejected, they’re actually never opened.
That is not cynicism, it is arithmetic. A working reporter on a mid-size business desk receives somewhere between fifty and two hundred pitches a day. According to Muck Rack’s State of Journalism 2026, a survey of more than a thousand journalists, 86% say at least some of their stories originate from PR outreach, but 88% immediately discard pitches that miss their beat, and close to half report that they seldom receive anything genuinely relevant to what they cover.
Read those two numbers together and the picture is clear. Journalists want your material. They just cannot find the usable 5% inside the noise.
This guide covers the format that survives that filter: what goes in each section, in what order, and why. There is a complete annotated example further down, and a set of failure patterns worth memorising.
What A Press Release Actually Is (and what it is not)
A press release is a formatted news document sent to journalists, editors and newswires announcing something that has genuinely happened or is about to.
The word doing the work in that sentence is news. A press release is not an advertisement, a blog post, or a company update dressed in a suit. It is a piece of pre-reported journalism that you are handing to a reporter in the hope they will verify it, expand it and run it.
That framing determines everything about the format. Every convention below exists because it makes a journalist’s job faster.
Things that are news: funding rounds, acquisitions, executive appointments at a recognised company, product launches with a genuine first, research findings, regulatory approvals, partnerships between named parties, crisis response, awards from bodies people have heard of.
Things that are not news, however much you want them to be: website redesigns, minor feature updates, “we are excited to announce” anything, blog posts, participation in a trade show, hiring below the executive level, anniversaries.
If your announcement is on the second list, a press release is the wrong instrument. You want content marketing, a customer story, or a LinkedIn post. Sending a release about a website redesign does not produce zero coverage; it produces negative coverage, because you have now taught that journalist that your name in their inbox is not worth opening.
The Press Release Format, Section By Section
The structure below is the newswire standard. Deviating from it does not make you distinctive, it makes you look like you have not done this before.
| Section |
Length |
Purpose |
The mistake to avoid |
| Release timing line |
1 line |
Signals FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE or an embargo date |
Using an embargo you have not agreed with the recipient |
| Headline |
60–90 characters |
States the news in plain language |
Adjectives, taglines, wordplay, your company slogan |
| Subheadline |
1 sentence |
Adds the second most important fact |
Repeating the headline in different words |
| Dateline |
1 line |
CITY, State, Month Day, Year |
Omitting the city — wires and local desks filter on it |
| Lead paragraph |
30–40 words |
Who, what, when, where, why, in one sentence |
Burying the news under company background |
| Body paragraphs |
2–4 paragraphs |
Context, mechanism, market significance, numbers |
Marketing language where evidence should be |
| Quotes |
1–2 quotes |
Human perspective and named accountability |
Quotes that say nothing a press officer could not have written |
| Supporting data |
1 paragraph or list |
Figures a reporter can verify and cite |
Statistics with no stated source or methodology |
| Boilerplate |
60–100 words |
Standing description of the company |
A 300-word history of the founders |
| Media contact |
3–4 lines |
Name, title, direct email, mobile |
A generic info@ address nobody monitors |
| End notation |
1 line |
### or -30- |
Leaving it off, so the reader cannot tell where the release ends |
Two structural rules govern the whole thing.
The inverted pyramid. Most important information first, least important last. Editors cut from the bottom. If your critical fact is in paragraph six, it will be deleted before publication.
One page. Four hundred to five hundred words. If you cannot state your news in that space, you either have several separate announcements or you do not have one.
Writing The Headline
The headline is where the majority of releases die, and the reason is almost always the same: the writer tried to be interesting instead of clear.
A journalist scanning a subject line is performing a single binary test, is this a story for my readers? Cleverness slows that test down. Specificity speeds it up.
Weak: Acme Reimagines the Future of Logistics Better: Acme Raises $40M Series B to Expand Same-Day Delivery to 12 US Cities
The second headline contains a number, a named action, and a scope. A reporter can decide in under a second. The first requires them to open the release to find out whether anything happened at all, and they will not.
Practical constraints: aim for 60 to 90 characters so it survives truncation in an email client, write it in present or past tense rather than future, lead with the company name only if the company is genuinely recognised, and never use a question mark.
The Lead Paragraph
Your lead answers the five Ws in roughly thirty to forty words. One sentence if you can manage it, two at most.
SAN FRANCISCO, March 14, 2026 — Acme Logistics today announced a $40 million Series B round led by Northgate Ventures, which the company will use to expand same-day delivery operations to twelve additional US metropolitan areas by the end of 2026.
Everything a reporter needs to decide whether to proceed is in that sentence: company, amount, round, lead investor, use of funds, geographic scope, timeline. If they publish nothing but this paragraph, the story is still accurate and complete.
Test your own lead this way. Delete every paragraph after it. Does what remains stand as a coherent, publishable news item? If not, the lead is doing the wrong job.
Quotes That Survive Editing
The default corporate quote is unusable, and everyone in the chain knows it:
“We are thrilled to announce this exciting milestone, which represents a significant step forward in our mission to deliver best-in-class solutions to our valued customers.”
This will be cut. It contains no information, no perspective, and no evidence that a human being said it out loud.
A usable quote does at least one of three things: explains a decision, provides context that is not obvious from the facts, or states a position someone could reasonably disagree with.
“Same-day delivery only works economically above a certain population density, which is why most operators stop at the top five metros,” said Dana Reyes, CEO of Acme Logistics. “Our routing model changes that threshold, and this round is a bet that we’re right about it.”
Attribute quotes to a named individual with a title. Use no more than two. If the announcement involves a second organisation — an investor, a partner, a customer — one quote from each side is standard, and the second one should not simply congratulate the first.
Formatting For Machines As Well As People
Press releases increasingly get read by systems before humans see them: wire aggregators, Google News, and AI assistants summarising a company’s recent activity.
That makes a few technical details worth the effort. When you publish the release on your own newsroom page, mark it up with Article or NewsArticle structured data, which Google’s documentation supports for exactly this content type. Include datePublished, headline, author and publisher. Use real HTML headings rather than bolded paragraphs, put your key figures in a table or list rather than burying them in prose, and give the release a permanent URL that does not change.
None of this affects whether a journalist covers you. All of it affects whether the release is discoverable six months later, when someone asks an AI assistant what your company has been doing.
Distribution: The Part Everyone Gets Backwards
Writing the release is roughly a quarter of the work. The rest is deciding who receives it.
The standard failure is to buy a wire distribution package, blast it to eight thousand outlets, and report the syndication count as coverage. Syndication is not coverage. A release republished verbatim on forty low-authority aggregator sites produces no readers, no credibility, and a set of backlinks Google has been discounting for over a decade.
What works is narrower and slower:
- Build a list of fifteen to thirty named journalists who have written about your specific subject in the last six months.
- Personalise the first two sentences of the email to reference something that reporter has actually published. This is the single strongest predictor of a reply.
- Put the news in the subject line, not the phrase “Press Release” or your company name.
- Paste the release into the email body. Attachments get filtered and are annoying to open on a phone.
- Offer something the release does not contain: an interview, exclusive data, an image set, a customer willing to talk.
- Follow up once, after three or four business days. Not twice.
- Use wire distribution as a supplement, for the record and for search visibility, not as the primary strategy.
If this sounds like more effort than a distribution package, it is, and it is also the reason most releases fail. Our PR and distribution team builds these lists by beat rather than by outlet volume, which is a slower process with a substantially better hit rate.
Common Failure Patterns
Announcing something that is not news. The most common problem by a wide margin. No amount of formatting rescues it.
Writing for your CEO instead of the reporter. Internal stakeholders want superlatives. Journalists want facts. When the two conflict, the journalist is the audience.
Unsourced statistics. “The market is projected to reach $12 billion” is worthless without a named source and a year. Reporters will not use a figure they cannot attribute.
Jargon density. If the release requires domain knowledge to parse, a general business reporter will pass it to nobody.
Missing or unreachable contact. A reporter working to a deadline who cannot reach a human within thirty minutes will drop the story. Include a mobile number.
No visual assets. Offer a logo, executive headshot and product image at publication resolution. Many outlets will not run a story they cannot illustrate.
Timing errors. Tuesday to Thursday, mornings in the recipient’s time zone. Avoid Fridays, holidays and days with major competing news.
A Complete Annotated Example
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Acme Logistics Raises $40M Series B to Expand Same-Day
Delivery to 12 US Cities
Northgate Ventures leads the round; company targets 40 metro
markets by end of 2026
SAN FRANCISCO, March 14, 2026 — Acme Logistics today announced
a $40 million Series B round led by Northgate Ventures, which
the company will use to expand same-day delivery operations to
twelve additional US metropolitan areas by the end of 2026.
The round brings Acme’s total funding to $62 million. Existing
investors Harbor Point and Cedar Lane Capital participated.
Northgate partner Michael Oyelaran will join the board.
Acme currently operates same-day delivery in eight metros,
processing approximately 45,000 orders per week. The company
reports that its per-delivery cost has fallen 31% over the past
eighteen months, which it attributes to a routing system that
batches orders across merchants rather than fulfilling them
individually.
"Same-day delivery only works economically above a certain
population density, which is why most operators stop at the top
five metros," said Dana Reyes, CEO of Acme Logistics. "Our
routing model changes that threshold, and this round is a bet
that we’re right about it."
"We looked at nine companies in this category," said Michael
Oyelaran, partner at Northgate Ventures. "Acme was the only one
whose unit economics improved as they entered smaller markets."
The twelve new markets will include Columbus, Nashville,
Salt Lake City and Richmond. Acme expects to add approximately
200 employees across operations and engineering in 2026.
About Acme Logistics
Acme Logistics operates same-day delivery infrastructure for
retail and grocery merchants across the United States. Founded
in 2021 and headquartered in San Francisco, the company serves
more than 1,200 merchant partners. Learn more at acmelogistics.com.
Media Contact
Priya Raman
Director of Communications, Acme Logistics
priya.raman@acmelogistics.com
+1 415 555 0182
###
What this example does right: the headline carries a number and a scope. The lead is a single sentence containing the complete news. Paragraph three introduces a verifiable operational metric with an explanation of its cause. The CEO quote states a contestable position rather than expressing enthusiasm. The investor quote adds independent validation instead of repeating the first quote. The boilerplate is sixty words. The contact is a named individual with a mobile number.
What it deliberately omits: the founding story, the mission statement, the word “excited,” any adjective that could not be verified, and the second page.
Before You Send
- The headline states what happened, contains no adjectives, and fits in 90 characters
- Deleting everything after the lead paragraph still leaves a complete news item
- Every statistic has a named source and a date
- Both quotes contain information rather than enthusiasm
- The release is under 500 words and fits on one page
- The dateline includes city, state and full date
- Media contact is a named person with a direct mobile number
- Images and logos are attached separately or linked at publication resolution
- The recipient list is built from named journalists, not outlet databases
- The release is marked up with Article structured data on your own newsroom page
Writing the release is the easy part. Deciding whether you have news, and finding the thirty people who would care about it, is the work. If you would like help with the second half of that, our content marketing team builds announcement calendars that separate what deserves a release from what belongs somewhere else entirely.
