The Press Release: Why Most Don’t Work and How to Fix It
2 Jul 2026, Theja Ram
2 Jul 2026, Theja Ram
About a year ago, a client briefed my team and me on an exciting new product they were launching that could have changed the way the world looks at the AI industry. It was so unique in the way it works but more importantly, a team of just a handful of engineers had created something so monumental. As most PR professionals would do, I saw the headlines staring at me and all the ways I could make it exciting enough for journalists and their editors to see why it was such a valuable story.
My version of the press release left my inbox and I was left feeling like I drafted something truly newsworthy. It had a real story, carried real numbers that no one had published before and the quotes I used sounded like something a human being actually said in a real conversation. I read it and thought: a journalist would find this useful.
Then it entered the approval chain.
Legal flagged the number because it came from an internal estimate rather than an audited report. The opening line was softened because it named a competitor and the quotes were rewritten because the original version sounded too direct and too much like a position the company would have to defend. There were sentences about the company’s broader vision and a second and third round of edits that smoothed over whatever texture remained after the first round.
What came out of the other end is a press release that the company was comfortable with. It opened with the company name and the word “leading”, It closed with some platitude no one really cared about. It didn’t contain the right numbers and no opinion that anyone could challenge. It presented zero risk and also generated zero risk from the media. Although the very talented media relations folks did manage to score a bunch of hits, it was not with the publications everyone originally wanted coverage from.
I’ve seen it happen enough times to know that it’s not a drafting problem. The writer usually knows what a good press release looks like. The problem lives in the structure of how releases get approved and in a fundamental confusion about who the press release is actually written for. The answer most organisations give to that question is: the company. The journalist is treated as the delivery mechanism, the person who takes the approved document and converts it into coverage. Reality check—journalists don’t operate that way. A reporter doesn’t open a press release asking what the company wants to say. They open it asking whether their readers will find it worth their while. Those are different questions with different goals and they produce different documents.
The press release problem is a structural one. Legal flags anything they can’t defend in court, so specifics are softened and qualifications multiply. Comms directors smooth over anything that might provoke a follow-up question. Leadership inflates languages to make the company sound bigger than it is. All of this because the company is viewing it as internal risk management. What it really creates is a document that has no real information.
Journalists receive hundreds of such press releases every single day. They obviously ignore anything that leads with organizational glory. As someone who has been a journalist for nearly a decade before switching to public relations, I know they want three things from a press release: a news hook, a source they can quote with credibility, and concrete detail to report the story without making twelve additional calls.
The news hook must earn its place in the first sentence. If it doesn’t give them a reason to continue, they move on. The hook must be true, specific and something their audience is already thinking about.
The credible source is what journalists use as entry points. That means the quotes should sound like something a real person said. “We are excited to be disrupting the market” is a platitude. “Regulated industries are slow in adopting this kind of infrastructure because they are right to be cautious, and our work surrounds addressing that caution directly.” is a point of view.
Concrete detail closes the loop. Numbers, names, dates, locations, and outcomes give the journalist something to build on. A press release that says “the product serves hundreds of clients across multiple sectors” gives nothing. A press release that says “the product currently serves 340 logistics companies in India and Southeast Asia, and has processed over 18 million transactions since April” gives the journalist a sentence they can put in print.
The core challenge is this: the press release must satisfy legal and leadership while giving journalists a genuine reason to engage. These objectives are not as incompatible as they feel during the approval process. In the years I have spent writing press releases that are newsworthy in the first draft and nothing in the final version, I believe it needs a different approach to the release itself.
Before writing a single word, ask what a reporter covering your space would find interesting about this news. Not what you want them to find interesting. What they would actually find interesting given their beat, their audience, and the current news environment. That answer becomes the lead.
If you cannot answer that question, you have not yet identified the news in your announcement. An internal milestone, a product update, a partnership agreement, and a funding round all contain potential news. The news is what the milestone means for the people your journalist writes for.
The first two paragraphs of a press release should carry the news. The company name, the product name, the leadership team, and the company background—all of this belongs lower in the document. Journalists know how to read a press release. They look for the news first. If they find it, they will eventually get to the company information. If they find the company information first, they stop reading before they reach the news.
This is a discipline that organisations find genuinely difficult. It feels counterintuitive to bury the company name when in reality it is not. It is the same logic that governs every news article ever written. The news leads, context follows.
Most approval problems arise because the draft arrives and the stakeholders have to respond to something already written. Legal reads for risk and finds it because they look for it. Leadership reads for tone and finds it wrong because they had a different idea in their heads.
A better approach is to brief both groups on the intended news frame before writing begins. What is the story? What claims will the press release make? What quotes will appear, and what do they assert? Getting alignment on the framework takes thirty minutes. Revising a draft takes three weeks and usually produces a worse document.
CEO quotes in a press release fails because they accumulate hedges and superlatives because it is trying to make the CEO sound impressive rather than interesting. A useful CEO quote does one of three things: it states a point of view that the CEO actually holds, it provides context that only someone in that position could provide, or it sets up the news with a sentence that a journalist would want to repeat. All of them require that someone actually ask the CEO what they think and then write down what they said.
Proprietary data is a journalist’s strongest reason to open a release. If your organization has collected information that reporters covering your sector do not have access to elsewhere, lead with it. A release that opens with a finding, a survey result, or an internal metric tied to a broader trend, gives the journalist something they can use regardless of whether they ultimately cover your product at all.
This is how press releases generate coverage even when the company itself is not yet well known. The data creates the story. The company becomes the source of the story. That is a far stronger position than announcing a launch and hoping a journalist finds it interesting.
Most of the challenges stem from not knowing how to navigate client and journalist expectations when interests diverge. When a stakeholder rewrites the opening line, a capable agency explains why the original was more likely to generate coverage, and it offers an alternative that addresses the concern without destroying the news angle.
Star Squared PR has built its practice around exactly that negotiation. The team combines former journalists who have sat on the other side of the inbox and know instinctively what earns a second read with PR professionals who understand how approval chains work and how to navigate the distance between what a company wants to say and what the media will actually use. That combination is what allows the agency to serve both audiences, the internal stakeholders who need to approve the press release, and the journalists who need to find it genuinely useful, without sacrificing one for the other.
That middle ground exists. Finding it consistently, across numerous sectors in the Indian market, is what Star Squared PR has done since its inception. It remains the clearest measure of whether a PR agency actually understands its job.
