Most press releases fail for boring, fixable reasons. Not because the writing is bad in some artistic sense, but because they break a small number of rules that editors use to sort their inbox at speed.
Here are the seventeen that come up most often, each with the fix. Work through them before you spend a dollar on distribution.
Problems with the news itself
1. There's no news. A new website, a rebrand, a partnership with no terms disclosed, a "thought leadership" position. If a stranger in your industry wouldn't repeat the fact at lunch, it isn't news. Fix: find the change. Something happened: money moved, a number crossed a threshold, someone joined, a product shipped, or a rule changed for your customers. Lead with that, or don't send.
2. You buried the lede. The actual news appears in paragraph four, after a paragraph about your company's mission. Fix: the first sentence contains the announcement. Not context. Not history. The thing that happened. If you cut everything before your first real fact, most releases improve.
3. It's about you, not about the change. "We are pleased to expand our offerings" instead of "customers in 14 new states can now file claims the same day." Fix: write the sentence a customer would care about, then attach your name to it.
4. You're announcing it too late. A funding round closed in June announced in September reads as old news, because it is. Fix: under two weeks from the event, or reframe around something current.
Problems with the writing
5. Adjective stuffing. Revolutionary, innovative, cutting-edge, game-changing, seamless, robust, world-class. These words carry zero information and signal that you had nothing concrete to say. Fix: delete every adjective, then add back only the ones that are measurably true. "Fastest" is fine if you can cite the benchmark.
6. Claims without numbers. "Significantly improves efficiency." Compared to what, measured how? Fix: "cuts invoice processing from 6 days to 8 hours, based on 40 customer accounts over Q2." Specific beats superlative every time.
7. Fake quotes. "We are thrilled to announce this milestone, which underscores our commitment to excellence." Nobody said this. Editors know nobody said this. Fix: call your executive, ask three questions, record the answers, use their actual sentences. A quote should contain an opinion, a specific, or a concession, meaning something that can only come from a person. Our guide to press release quotes covers how to get usable ones.
8. The quote could belong to any company. Swap out the company name. Does the quote still work? Then it says nothing. Fix: the quote must reference a detail unique to this announcement.
9. Jargon that requires your org chart to decode. "Our omnichannel orchestration layer." Fix: write it the way you'd explain it to a smart friend outside your industry. If your product needs two sentences of setup, spend those two sentences.
10. Too long. 1,200 words of background nobody requested. Wires also charge by word count, so you are paying to bore people. Fix: 400–600 words. See our breakdown of how long a press release should be.
11. Wall of text. Eight-sentence paragraphs, no subheads. Fix: two to four sentences per paragraph. Short paragraphs get skimmed, long ones get skipped.
12. No dateline or a wrong one. The city and date tell an editor where and when this is happening, and both the wire and the search index use that metadata. Fix: CITY, State — Month DD, YYYY, at the start of the lede. The format guide has the exact structure.
Problems with the mechanics
13. Wrong or missing contact. A generic info@ address, a name with no phone number, or worse, a contact who doesn't know the release went out. This is the most expensive mistake on this list, because it only costs you the times it works, when a reporter wanted to follow up and couldn't. Fix: a named human, a direct email, a mobile number, and that human briefed and available for 48 hours after distribution.
14. PDF attachments. You attached the release as a PDF, or worse, a .docx. Reporters won't open it, spam filters dislike it, and the text can't be copied into a CMS. Fix: paste the full release into the body of the email. Always. Link to assets rather than attaching them, and our sending guide covers the email mechanics.
15. Dead or ugly links. Links to a staging URL, a page that 404s on launch day, or a homepage when you meant a product page. Fix: click every link in the final draft, in a private browser window, the morning it goes out.
16. Typos in the headline, name, or number. Wires cannot recall a distributed release. An error in the funding amount lives on a hundred syndicated sites forever, and correcting it means paying to distribute again. Fix: two people read it aloud. Check the spelling of every proper noun against an official source, including your own executives' names.
17. Sending it to everybody. A BCC blast to 400 reporters, none of whom cover your sector. Fix: distribution and pitching are separate jobs. The wire creates the public record. A short, personal note to eight reporters who have written about your exact topic in the last 90 days creates the story. Don't confuse the two.
The one that isn't on the list
The biggest mistake isn't a writing error at all: expecting distribution to produce coverage. Paying a wire puts your release on news sites and in search results. It does not make a journalist write about you, and any service that implies it does is selling you something it can't deliver. Distribution gets you on the record. Coverage comes from having news and telling the right person about it directly.
Both are worth doing. Just know which one you're buying.
A ten-minute pre-send check
- Read the first sentence alone. Is the news in it?
- Delete every adjective. Is the draft worse? If not, leave them deleted.
- Count the numbers. Fewer than two? You need more specifics.
- Read the quote aloud. Would a human say this?
- Word count between 400 and 600?
- Click every link.
- Is the contact person real, named, and reachable today?
- Spell-check every proper noun.
- Have someone outside the project read it and tell you what the news is. If they get it wrong, rewrite the lede.
Most releases that get ignored fail at steps 1, 4, or 9. Fix those three and you're ahead of most of what lands in an editor's inbox.
Start from a structure that already avoids most of these: [our templates](/templates) are built around the checks above.