How to Write a Press Release

Detailed guidelines for struggling PR people

General rules for writing a press release

The one thing you have to always keep in mind while writing a press release is that you do it for a media outlet, not just your company. Your goal is to make them interested and publish it.

A perfect press release looks like a decently written news piece and needs no editorial involvement from the media in question. They just have to read it and say: “We have everything we need here, what a wonderful person must have written this.”

Keeping that in mind, here are some general guidelines:

• No boasting. “Horns and Hooves Inc. is the world’s greatest and most beautiful manufacturer of digital manure” is a huge no. Don’t show off. Use facts and only facts. It’s the facts that must say your company is the greatest and prettiest of them all. Not your words. The text must look unbiased.
• Don’t make a release just because you need some media coverage. Let’s be honest, most companies need it most of the time, so that’s not an excuse. Make sure that whatever you write about is a newsworthy event.
• For the love of all that’s holy, show some care for those who will read it. As I said above, a perfect release is just a ready-made news piece one could easily publish straight away.

And now let’s get to the details.

Specific rules for writing a press release

A perfect release has a pyramidal structure. It means that it consists of a title, a lead-in, the news piece itself, and background info.

• Title: what your release is all about? For example: “SpaceZ Announces It Will Hire More Millennials for Its Alpha Centauri Mission.” If you know that the media you send it to likes to use subtitles, make sure to write one as well.
• Lead-in: it’s the first paragraph of the release. Basically it says the same as the title but in greater detail. If you did everything right, reading the lead-in should be enough to know everything there is to know about your event. For example: “SpaceZ, a company sending tin cans with people beyond the borders of the Solar system, has announced that it will hire millennials to send them to Alpha Centauri. The company’s CEO Dr. Evil noted that the decision comes as a response to the U.N.’s call for a fight with biological waste.” Yeah, I’m a millennial myself, so I can joke like that.
• News piece: more detail. In the SpaceZ example that would be some quotes from the company’s management and engineers, some descriptions, and the company’s plans for the future. Remember: one paragraph for one idea. If you started describing a tin can, make sure your description ends with the paragraph. You also need to make sure that all paragraphs, when put together, form a logical and reasonable story. You can test it: if you swap two random paragraphs with each other, everything will be ruined. If not, chances are your story isn’t exactly logical. The more comprehensible structure your text has, the easier it is for the readers.
• Background: the final touch for it all. Recall some notable events your company had in the past. Not just anything, though: it has to be related somehow to the topic of your current release. Then state some contacts of a person the media outlet could call if they have any further questions. And finally, offer a picture that would accompany your release when it’s published. Or at least come up with some recommendations as to the contents of the picture if you don’t have one or the media outlet in question doesn’t want to use yours. That’s common courtesy.

And one more thing. If you cannot avoid boasting, make it a quote. It’s way more reasonable for a CEO to sing hosanna to their company than to write the very same thing in a presumably unbiased text.

If you follow those rules, any media outlet would be really happy to receive press releases from your company. And the happier they are, the more likely they will cooperate with you.

That’s all for today. Stay tuned.