Editors and wire services see hundreds of releases a day, and most get the same treatment: a few seconds of scanning before a decision to run it, skip it, or file it. What separates a release that gets picked up from one that doesn’t is rarely the underlying news — it’s almost always the structure.
The headline carries more weight than founders expect. It needs to state the actual news, in plain language, in under twelve words if possible. “Company Announces Exciting New Chapter” tells an editor nothing and gets skipped in the first second. “Acme Launches AI-Powered Inventory Tool for Small Retailers” tells them exactly what to expect and gives them a reason to keep reading.
The first paragraph needs to answer who, what, when, where, and why in two or three sentences, before any supporting detail. This is the paragraph most likely to survive if an editor trims the release for space or an aggregator only pulls the opening lines — so the most important information has to live there, not three paragraphs down.
Quotes need to say something a press release can’t say about itself. A quote that reads “We’re thrilled to announce this milestone” adds nothing; a quote that gives a specific reason, number, or perspective — why now, what changed, what’s next — gives a journalist something to actually use if they want to build a story around the release rather than just running it verbatim.
Boilerplate matters more than it seems. The short company description at the bottom is often the only context a wire service or aggregator has to categorize and route the release correctly, so it needs to be accurate, current, and specific enough to signal the right industry and audience.
Finally, formatting discipline — a clean dateline, consistent capitalization, no marketing exclamation points, appropriate length — signals professionalism that both human editors and automated wire systems respond to. A release that looks like it was written for an internal newsletter, not a newsroom, gets treated accordingly.
None of this guarantees pickup, especially for earned media where an editor’s judgment is the final word. But a release built this way gives every version of that judgment — human or automated — the best possible reason to say yes.
