The press release is simultaneously overhyped and underused, overhyped by people who think it summons journalists, underused by people who don't know what it's actually for.
What a press release actually does
A wire-distributed release syndicates your announcement across financial and news networks, think Yahoo! Finance and the outlets that republish wire content. That produces: an indexed, citable record of your news; links and mentions that support search; and a professional artifact you can point investors, partners, and AI models at. What it rarely does on its own is generate feature coverage. Features come from pitching; releases come from distributing.
When to send one
Releases work when there's actual news: a launch, funding, a key hire, a partnership, an acquisition, meaningful data. "We exist and we're great" is not news, and wires increasingly reject it.
Write it as news, not marketing
Wire standards are real: third person throughout, no superlatives you can't source, a factual headline, a quote that sounds like a human, and a boilerplate that states plainly what the company is. If it reads like an ad, it gets bounced, or worse, published and ignored.
The part everyone skips: deployment
After distribution, the release is inventory. Link it from your newsroom page. Add the syndicated coverage to your "As Seen In" bar. Cite it in your Wikipedia-style entity sources. Send it to the trade journalists who cover your niche as background. A release that just sits on the wire earned a fraction of its value.
Cadence beats size
Four modest, genuine announcements a year build a living news footprint. One giant release every three years builds nothing. Search engines and AI both read silence as decline.
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