How to Write a Press Release That Actually Gets Picked Up (2026 Guide)

Most press releases fail before an editor reads the second sentence. Not because the news is weak, but because the release is organised around the sender's internal politics instead of the reader's question.

The structure that works

Six elements, in this order. Deviate and you are making an editor work to find the news.

1. Dateline — city, state or country, then the date. It signals the release is geographically grounded.
2. Headline — the news, stated plainly, ideally under 100 characters.
3. Subheadline — one line of supporting detail. Optional, often where the number goes.
4. Opening paragraph — the who, what, when, where, why. Two sentences maximum.
5. Body — context, numbers, the quote, and what happens next.
6. Boilerplate and contact — who you are in two sentences, and an email address that a journalist can use today.

Headlines

The test is simple: could a subeditor scan this and know whether the story is for them? Specific nouns and a number in the headline outperform clever phrasing almost every time.

Weak: Company announces exciting new chapter in its growth journey. Strong: Company opens 40-person engineering office in Lisbon, hiring by June.

Keep search intent in mind, but never at the cost of accuracy. If the phrase you want to rank for makes the headline false or clumsy, change the phrase, not the fact. Our SEO PR guide covers that trade-off in detail.

The first paragraph

This is the paragraph that gets quoted, syndicated, summarised by search engines and lifted into AI answers. It should stand alone if everything after it were deleted.

• Name the organisation exactly as you want to be named elsewhere.
• State the action with an active verb.
• Include the number that makes the news material.
• Skip the scene-setting preamble entirely.

Quotes that do something

A quote is not a place to repeat the body copy with the words "we are excited" in front of it. It is the one place a reader hears a human explain significance, motive or what happens next.

Include attribution with a real title, and include a second quote only if it brings a genuinely different perspective — a customer, a partner, an independent expert. Two quotes making the same point is one quote.

Boilerplate and contact

The boilerplate is your about section, capped at two sentences: what the organisation does, how big it is, where it is based. Pickup pages reproduce it verbatim, so keep it current and consistent with what your website and structured data say.

The contact should be a monitored mailbox, not a generic form. Journalists work on deadlines and will abandon a story rather than fill in a contact form.

Pre-submission checklist

• Headline states the news and is under 100 characters
• Dateline present with city and date
• First paragraph is quotable on its own
• At least one specific, verifiable number
• At least one quote from a named person with a title
• Every comparative or superlative claim has a source
• Boilerplate is current and factual
• Media contact is monitored during working hours
• Media assets are licensed and captioned

Format it for machines as well as people

In 2026, part of your audience is a retrieval system. That means clean heading hierarchy, a summary block near the top, stable URLs, and structured data describing the article and your organisation. None of that conflicts with good writing — it is the same discipline applied to a different reader.