How to write a press release that gets covered

A press release is a short news announcement written for journalists, and it earns coverage when it reads like news rather than an advert. If an editor can lift the story from your first paragraph and run it almost as it is, you have written a good one.

What a press release is for

Use a release for something genuinely newsworthy: a product launch, an award win, a partnership, a funding round, a piece of original research. Its job is to make the journalist's job easy. Give them a complete story they can publish with minimal extra work.

If the news is thin, no amount of formatting will save it. A routine update your customers already know will not get covered. Save releases for moments your audience and the local press would genuinely care about, and set your expectations accordingly: a release is an invitation to cover your news, not a guarantee of publication.

Start with the story, not the company

Journalists skim, so write in inverted pyramid order: the most important information first, with the rest as detail. The first paragraph should answer who, what, when, where and why in two or three sentences. The second should carry the key detail or the strongest quote. Background, context and supporting facts come after.

An example: "Smith and Co, the Leeds bakery chain, has opened its 20th shop in Harrogate, creating 12 jobs." The reader knows the who, what, where and why in one sentence. If an editor reads only that first paragraph, they should still understand the whole story. Put the news and your company name in the opening lines, and leave the history for the end.

What journalists need

A release should carry everything needed to publish it as is:

• A headline that states the news plainly
• A dateline with the town or city and the date
• Quotes from a named person with a real job title
• Facts, figures and dates that check out
• A boilerplate: two or three lines explaining who you are
• A named contact with an email address and phone number

Send the release in the body of an email, with a link to supporting images and an offer of an interview. One polite follow-up after a couple of days is enough. Chasing editors with repeated calls rarely helps.

Write quotes a person would actually say

The fastest way to kill a release is a quote that reads like a committee wrote it. Editors cut language that sounds corporate. A short quote in plain English from a named person with a real title is far more likely to be used, because it gives the story a human voice the reader can hear.

Where press releases fit

A press release is one part of a wider content strategy. The coverage it earns builds authority, and that authority supports your search rankings as well as your reputation. It is work we deliver for clients: we wrote the TrustATrader release on the industry crackdown against cowboy builders, and the case-study results our clients report include +400% for TrustATrader and a +251% increase in organic traffic for Home Instead.

If you would like content that earns coverage and ranks, from press releases to search-optimised articles, our team plans and writes it for you. See what the content marketing service includes at https://victory.digital/content-marketing