The last part of this series on press release writing in 2026 looks at the biggest change of all – the journalist it’s aimed at.
Many B2B marketers still write press releases as if the reader lives in our niche. Once upon a time that was fair. There were three times as many magazines in each market (all with different specialisations) and they employed three times as many journalists (again, all with different specialisations). It was fair to assume assume the reader knew the acronyms and why the technical change mattered.
Journalists today are often stretched across wider subject areas and even multiple publications. The specialist who only covered blue widgets is rarer. That changes what a press release needs to do. It must work more clearly and more quickly.
This does not mean we have to write a tutorial. It means we make the significance explicit. We tell the reader what changed and why it matters, in terms that can be understood without needing to have worked in our market sector.
In industrial marketing, that might mean expanding technical benefits into operational consequences. We should stop assuming the journalist will do the joining-up work. And if the release does not define the buyer, it may be framed for the wrong audience.
This is not only helpful for journalists. It also makes the release more usable for everyone else who reads it, such as analysts, procurement staff and our own internal people who are not close to the product.
The simplest test is to give the release to someone who is technically minded, but not in our market sector. If they cannot explain the news back in one sentence, the release is not doing its job.