How to Write a Press Release: Format, Template, and Examples (2026 Guide)

What Is a Press Release and When Should You Send One?

A press release is a formal news document sent to journalists and media outlets to announce something newsworthy. According to the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), press releases should be reserved for genuinely newsworthy events: product launches, funding rounds, executive hires, partnerships, acquisitions, and earnings. Sending releases for non-news dilutes credibility with reporters.

The distinction between news and non-news is where most organizations fail. A new product feature is not automatically newsworthy. A redesigned website is not news. A press release earns coverage when it announces something that changes the competitive landscape, affects customers in a measurable way, or involves information the public has a legitimate interest in knowing.

• Product launches with named customers and measurable outcomes
• Funding rounds with investor names, amount, and intended use of capital
• Executive hires where the hire signals a strategic shift (new CTO, first CFO, board additions)
• Acquisitions and mergers with deal terms and integration plans
• Partnerships that create something new for end customers, not co-marketing agreements
• Research and data with original findings that challenge assumptions
• Awards and recognition from credible, named third parties

According to Cision's 2025 State of the Media Report, 68% of journalists say they receive too many irrelevant press releases. The consequence is real: reporters who receive non-news releases from a company are less likely to open future releases from that same sender. Every release that is not genuinely newsworthy damages the sender's credibility for the release that is.

What Are the Six Parts of a Standard Press Release?

Every press release follows a six-part structure: headline, dateline, lead paragraph, body paragraphs, spokesperson quote, and company boilerplate with media contact. This format has remained standard for over 50 years because it maps to how journalists extract information. According to PR Newswire, releases following this structure receive 2.3x more journalist engagement.

The lead paragraph carries the entire release. If a journalist reads nothing else, they should be able to write a one-sentence story from the lead alone. The standard test: does the first sentence answer at least three of the five Ws (who, what, when, where, why)? If not, rewrite it. According to a 2026 Muck Rack survey of 3,000 journalists, 72% decide whether to pursue a story based solely on the headline and first paragraph.

How Should You Write a Press Release Headline?

A press release headline states the news in 8 to 12 words using specific facts, not adjectives. The headline should function as a standalone news summary. According to Prowly's 2026 analysis of 50,000 press releases, headlines containing numbers receive 37% higher open rates than those without.

The most common headline failure is leading with the company name in a self-congratulatory frame. 'Acme Corp Announces Amazing New Platform' tells the journalist nothing about the news. 'Acme Corp Raises $50M Series C to Expand Enterprise AI Platform' tells them everything. The difference: facts versus claims.

• Strong: 'Stripe Acquires Lemon Squeezy to Enter Creator Economy Payments'
• Strong: 'OpenAI Launches $200/Month Pro Plan with Unlimited GPT-5 Access'
• Strong: 'Figma Reports 40% Revenue Growth, Reaches $800M ARR'
• Weak: 'Leading Tech Company Announces Exciting New Product'
• Weak: 'Innovative Startup Disrupts Industry with Breakthrough Solution'

Subheadlines are optional but useful for adding context the main headline cannot carry. A subheadline typically runs 15 to 25 words and provides supporting detail: the customer use case, the market context, or the significance of the announcement. Use them when the headline alone does not convey why the news matters.

How Do You Write a Lead Paragraph That Journalists Use?

The lead paragraph answers who, what, when, where, and why in 25 to 35 words. According to Cision's 2025 Global State of the Media study, 44% of journalists will not read past it. The lead should be a complete, publishable sentence a reporter could use directly.

A working lead reads like a news wire sentence, not a marketing statement. It names the company, states the action, quantifies the significance, and provides temporal context. Everything else in the release supports this sentence.

Compare two approaches. Weak lead: 'Acme Corp, the top provider of innovative solutions, is thrilled to announce the launch of its new platform.' Strong lead: 'SAN FRANCISCO — June 25, 2026 — Acme Corp, a developer tools company with 12,000 customers, today launched Acme Deploy, a CI/CD platform that reduces deployment time by 80% for enterprise engineering teams.' The strong version gives the journalist five facts in one sentence. The weak version gives them zero.

What Should the Body of a Press Release Contain?

The body provides supporting evidence in two to three paragraphs, ordered from most to least newsworthy. It should include at least one customer reference, one data point, and one forward-looking statement. According to PR Newswire (2026), releases over 600 words see a 28% drop in engagement.

The inverted pyramid structure applies: the most important information comes first, and each subsequent paragraph adds decreasing levels of detail. Journalists cut from the bottom when space is tight. If your most important supporting fact is in the fourth paragraph, it will be the first to disappear.

1. Paragraph 2: Supporting evidence. Expand on the lead with specific facts: pricing, availability, customer names, performance benchmarks, or market context. This is where data belongs.
2. Paragraph 3: Context and significance. Why does this matter? What problem does it solve? What market trend does it respond to? Use third-party validation (analyst quotes, market data, independent research) here.
3. Paragraph 4: Forward-looking detail. Availability dates, next steps, rollout plans. Keep this brief and specific.

Every body paragraph should contain at least one verifiable fact: a number, a name, a date, or a specific metric. Paragraphs that contain only claims without evidence are marketing copy, not news content. Journalists skip them. AI search engines deprioritize them.

How Do You Write a Quote That Sounds Like a Real Person?

A spokesperson quote should say something a real executive would say in conversation, not committee-written corporate language. According to Muck Rack's 2026 journalist survey, 61% of reporters rewrite or discard press release quotes that sound too corporate. Quotes should add perspective the rest of the release cannot.

Quotes serve a specific function in a press release: they add human perspective that straight reporting cannot. A quote should say something the preceding paragraphs did not already say. If the quote simply restates facts from the lead in first person, it adds nothing.

• Weak: 'We are thrilled to announce this exciting new product that will revolutionize the industry.'
• Strong: 'Engineering teams spend 40% of their time on deployment infrastructure instead of building product. Deploy eliminates that overhead entirely.'
• Weak: 'This partnership represents a strategic alignment of our shared vision for innovation.'
• Strong: 'We built the payments infrastructure; Lemon Squeezy built the creator distribution. Together, creators get paid faster without changing their workflow.'

The test for a good quote: read it aloud. If it sounds like something a person would say to a colleague over coffee, it works. If it sounds like it was generated by a press release template, rewrite it. Include the speaker's full name, title, and company on first reference.

What Goes in a Company Boilerplate and Media Contact Block?

The boilerplate is a standardized 75-to-100-word company description placed at the end of every release. It includes the company name, what it does, key metrics, founding year, headquarters location, and a website URL. According to PR Daily, 84% of journalists reference the boilerplate when covering a company.

The boilerplate is not marketing copy. It is a reference paragraph journalists use when they need to describe the company in their story. Write it in third person, state facts, and avoid superlatives. 'Acme Corp is a developer tools company founded in 2019, serving 12,000 customers including Stripe, Shopify, and Datadog. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company has raised $120M in venture funding.' That is a boilerplate. 'Acme Corp is a top provider of innovative developer solutions' is not.

The media contact block appears after the boilerplate and includes a named person (not a generic inbox), their title, email address, and phone number. Journalists who cannot reach a real person within 30 minutes of receiving a release will move on to the next story. According to Cision (2025), releases with a named media contact receive 45% more follow-up inquiries than those with only a generic press@company.com address.

How Do Press Releases Perform in AI Search Engines?

AI search engines including ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews index and cite press releases that contain structured, fact-dense content. According to Muck Rack's May 2026 analysis, earned media accounts for 84% of all AI citations across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Well-structured releases contribute to this signal.

Press releases optimized for AI citation share the same qualities as releases that earn traditional coverage: specific facts, named entities, verifiable data, and clear structure. AI engines extract information at the sentence level. Releases with vague claims ('best-in-category solution') provide nothing extractable. Releases with specific claims ('processes 2.4 million transactions per day with 99.99% uptime') give AI engines a citable fact.

• Include specific numbers in every paragraph: revenue, customer count, performance metrics, pricing
• Name real customers and partners rather than referencing 'leading companies'
• Use structured data (Schema.org NewsArticle markup) when publishing on your own newsroom
• Publish the full release on your company newsroom as a permanent, crawlable page
• Include a dateline and timestamp so AI engines can assess freshness

According to Lee (2026), pages with 15 or more named entities show 4.8x higher AI citation probability. A press release that names the company, CEO, product, three customers, two investors, and a market category already reaches that threshold. The same specificity that makes a release useful to journalists makes it citable by AI search engines.

What Are the Most Common Press Release Mistakes?

The five most common press release mistakes are burying the news below the first paragraph, using promotional language instead of facts, exceeding 500 words, omitting a direct media contact, and sending to irrelevant journalists. According to Cision (2025), 75% of journalists cite irrelevance as their top frustration.

How Should You Distribute a Press Release for Maximum Coverage?

Press release distribution works best through targeted, personalized outreach to 15 to 25 relevant journalists, supplemented by wire service distribution for regulatory or investor-facing announcements. According to Muck Rack's 2026 data, personalized pitches that include a press release attachment receive 3.2x more responses than releases sent through wire-only distribution without direct outreach.

Wire services (PR Newswire, Business Wire, GlobeNewsWire) serve a legitimate function for publicly traded companies with disclosure requirements, and for broad distribution that ensures the release appears in financial databases and news aggregators. For most companies, wire distribution alone is insufficient to earn coverage. The release needs to reach specific journalists who cover the beat, accompanied by a brief, personalized pitch explaining why this news matters to their audience.

1. Build a targeted list of 15-25 journalists who cover the relevant beat, company stage, and geography
2. Write a personalized pitch for each journalist (2-3 sentences explaining why this story fits their coverage)
3. Attach the release as an inline document, not a PDF attachment (PDFs are harder to search and copy from)
4. Send on Tuesday through Thursday between 7am and 10am in the journalist's time zone (Cision, 2025 data)
5. Publish on your newsroom as a permanent, indexable page with Schema.org NewsArticle markup
6. Distribute via wire if required for regulatory disclosure or if broad syndication is strategically valuable
7. Follow up once within 48 hours; more than one follow-up damages the relationship

Distribution timing matters. According to Cision's 2025 analysis of 100,000 press releases, releases sent on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings receive 22% more journalist engagement than those sent on Monday or Friday. Avoid sending during major news events, earnings season peaks, or late afternoon when reporters are filing stories on deadline.

Related Guides

• Press Release Examples: What Gets Covered and Why (With Annotated Templates for 2026)
• How to Make a Product Launch Announcement: Timing, Strategy, and Channels (2026)
• How to Announce a Funding Round: A Complete Guide for Founders (2026)
• How to Announce Executive Hires and Leadership Changes: When It's News and When It's Not
• What Does a PR Agency Do? Services, Cost, and How to Know When You Need One
• PR Strategy: How to Build a Communications Strategy That Proves Value

Key Takeaways

• A press release has six parts: headline, dateline, lead, body, quote, and boilerplate with media contact.
• The lead paragraph should answer at least three of the five Ws in 25 to 35 words.
• Optimal length is 300 to 500 words; releases over 600 words see a 28% drop in journalist engagement.
• Headlines with specific numbers receive 37% higher open rates than headlines without them.
• Personalized pitches to 15-25 targeted journalists outperform mass wire distribution by 3.2x.
• Press releases with 15 or more named entities show 4.8x higher AI citation probability.

Frequently Asked Questions