How a press release is structured
Press releases follow tight rules. A journalist receiving 80 emails a day won't forgive ambiguity. The classic structure has been intact for decades: headline, lead, inverted pyramid body, executive quote, boilerplate, contact. What changed is that today you also need to think about SEO and how the release reads pasted into Slack or WhatsApp.
Applying AIDA
- Attention (headline): 8-12 words, direct, stating what happened. "Acme Corp raises $5M to scale its course platform."
- Interest (lead): first paragraph answers who, what, when, where, why. Three sentences max.
- Desire (body): two or three paragraphs with context, numbers, why it matters. Direct quote from CEO or partner.
- Action (close): 3-4 line corporate boilerplate + press contact.
Non-negotiable rules
- One news item per release. Three things to say means three releases.
- Inverted pyramid. Most important on top. The journalist should be able to cut the last paragraph and the story still makes sense.
- Real executive quote, not marketing. "We're excited to announce..." never gets published. "We went from 5,000 to 50,000 customers in 12 months because we found the product the market had been asking for" does.
- Consistent boilerplate. Three to four lines: founding date, founders, scope.
- Press kit attached. Logo, hi-res photos, short bios, fact sheet.
Mistakes that send your release to spam
- Superlative headlines: "the best", "world's first", "revolutionary". Journalists filter them automatically.
- Internal jargon. If the first paragraph has 4 acronyms, nobody understands.
- No numbers. A story without numbers is an opinion.
- Mass blasting a generic media list. 10 relevant journalists with a personalized email beat 200 with a blast.
- No high-res photo. No image, no good story.
When NOT to send a release
Not everything happening at your company is news. Don't send releases for: hiring a mid-level manager, adding a minor integration, a cosmetic rebrand, or anniversaries with no new data point. Simple rule: if your own sales team wouldn't find it useful for customer conversations, neither will a journalist.