If we want our press releases to be used, we should write them for modern readers, not for our own template.
Press releases are one of those marketing habits that can run on autopilot for years. We have a template. We have a “Notes to editors” block that gets pasted in. We have a boilerplate paragraph that grows by a sentence every time someone senior wants their favourite phrase included. We have legal lines that never get removed, only added to.
This is why it might be a good moment to step back and reassess. What does that look like?
It is not some sort of ‘rebrand’ of the press release. It is a return to basics. I’ll expand on some of the issues over the next few posts, but if you just want the TL;DR and want to know what I recommend, it’s this:
A shorter opening and a clearer “why this matters”. Fewer adjectives. More specifics. Boilerplate trimmed to what is necessary. Legal additions moved to the end and kept as tight as possible. And finally, a deliberate assumption that the reader will be intelligent but may not be specialised.
Press releases still have value in B2B. They are one of the few formats that can create a single, official statement that others can reference. But to earn that value, they need to respect how journalism and attention have changed.