How to write a press release.
The structure, the rules, and the specific habits that stop an announcement being usable. Written for people who have to write one, not for people who write about writing them.
The one rule that matters most
Your first sentence has to work alone. Assume it will be pulled out and read with nothing around it — by an editor deciding in four seconds, or by a system extracting a summary. If it contains positioning instead of news, positioning is what travels.
Everything below is downstream of that.
The structure
Headline
What happened, in plain words, under about 15 words. Not a slogan. If a reader cannot tell what occurred from the headline alone, it is not finished.
Subheadline
One sentence adding the detail the headline could not carry. Optional, but it is where the “so what” usually belongs.
Dateline
City, state and date. Unglamorous and load-bearing — it establishes when and where, which is the first thing anyone assessing the news needs.
Lead paragraph
Who, what, where, when, in one or two sentences. Complete and accurate in isolation. This is the paragraph that does the work.
Body
Detail in descending order of importance. Assume every reader stops at a different point, and that nobody reaches the end.
Quotation
One, from a named person with a title. It should say something a press release cannot say in its own voice — a judgment, a reason, a view.
Boilerplate
A short factual paragraph about the organization. What it does, since when, where. Not a sales pitch.
Media contact
A name, a working phone number and a monitored email address. A release without a reachable contact is a dead end.
What to cut
| Cut this | Because | Write this |
|---|---|---|
| “is pleased to announce” | Says nothing; delays the news | Start with the news |
| “leading provider” | Unverifiable, therefore uncitable | A specific fact: founded when, serving where |
| “innovative solution” | Describes nothing | What it does, in one clause |
| “select markets” | Answers no question | Name the markets |
| “in the near future” | Not a date | The actual date, or say it is not set |
| “game-changing” | You cannot know this yet | What changes, specifically |
| “the company said” | Companies do not speak | A named person with a title |
Length
Between 400 and 800 words for most announcements. We accept up to 1,400. Beyond that a release stops reading as a release and the factual density — the thing that makes the format useful — drops.
Padding is not neutral. It dilutes.
Writing the quotation
Most press release quotations are unusable because they restate the facts in a more enthusiastic register. A quotation should carry something the surrounding prose cannot: why the decision was made, what the tradeoff was, what the person thinks.
Before you send it
Final checklist
- Does the first sentence work with nothing around it?
- Is every claim either verifiable or removed?
- Is there a named person with a title attached to the quotation?
- Are the dates explicit — when it happened, when it takes effect?
- Are places named rather than gestured at?
- Is the contact reachable today?
- Is it under 1,400 words?
- Would you read it if it were about someone else?