Here's an uncomfortable test. Open any wire feed, read ten press releases, and count how many quotes you could imagine appearing in an actual news story. The usual answer is zero. Ten releases, ten executives "thrilled to announce," ten quotes that no journalist has ever printed and no journalist ever will.
The quote is the one part of a press release where a human being gets to say something a reporter can't write themselves. Most companies spend it saying nothing. This guide is about spending it well.
Why most quotes are unusable
Journalists use quotes for a specific job: opinion, stakes, and color, the subjective material a reporter can't state in their own voice. A reporter can write "Acme raised $4M" as fact. They cannot write "this market is broken and everyone in it knows it" as fact. That's a claim, and claims need a named human attached. That's what your quote is for.
Which explains why the standard release quote fails. Look at the template everyone unconsciously follows:
"We are thrilled to announce this exciting partnership. This collaboration aligns perfectly with our mission of delivering innovative solutions, and we look forward to creating value for our customers."
Three sentences, zero information. It expresses no opinion (being thrilled about your own news is not an opinion), raises no stakes, contains no color. A journalist reading it learns nothing they could use, so they don't use it. Worse, it's interchangeable: swap in any company name from any industry and the quote still "works," which is the definitive proof it says nothing.
There's a second failure mode: the quote that restates facts. "This $4M round will allow us to expand our engineering team and accelerate our product roadmap" is body-paragraph material wearing quotation marks. If a sentence would work fine unquoted in the release body, it's wasted as a quote. (Where facts belong in the structure is covered in our format guide.)
What makes a quote quotable
A usable quote does at least one of these four jobs:
- Takes a position. Says something about the market, the problem, or the industry that a reporter couldn't assert as fact. Mild controversy is fine, and it's often the point.
- Names the stakes. Who is affected, what happens if the problem stays unsolved, what the number means in human terms.
- Reveals something. A detail, motivation, or behind-the-scenes fact that appears nowhere else in the release.
- Sounds like a person. Contractions, plain words, rhythm. If it reads like it survived four rounds of legal review, it reads like that to journalists too.
And one structural rule: the quote must not repeat any fact the release already states. The release carries the facts. The quote carries the voice.
Five before/after rewrites
Funding announcement
- Before: "We are excited to close this round and grateful to our investors for believing in our vision."
- After: "Every logistics tool on the market was built for thousand-truck fleets, then awkwardly shrunk down. The 40-truck operator got nothing. That's the company we're building for."
Product launch
- Before: "This launch represents a major milestone in our commitment to innovation."
- After: "Our pilot customers stopped doing fuel reconciliation by hand in week one. One CFO told us she got a full day of her month back."
New hire
- Before: "We are delighted to welcome Dana to the team and confident she will drive our next phase of growth."
- After: "Dana scaled Oscar's platform through the exact stage we're entering now. I've been trying to hire her for two years, and I'm glad she finally ran out of reasons to say no."
Partnership
- Before: "This strategic partnership will deliver enhanced value to both organizations' customers."
- After: "Pharmacy delivery has been a same-week promise in most of the country. Starting today it's a same-day promise in 40 cities, and we think that becomes the default expectation within two years."
Award or milestone
- Before: "This recognition reflects the hard work and dedication of our entire team."
- After: "Two years ago we couldn't get a meeting with these operators. Crossing 100,000 riders means the wait-and-see crowd is done waiting."
Notice the pattern in every rewrite: an opinion about the market, a human detail, or a stake, and not one restated fact.
The mechanics: attribution, length, and who speaks
- One quote per release is the default. Two is the maximum, and the second must come from a different party (an investor, customer, or partner) adding a genuinely different perspective. Three quotes is a press release wearing a panel discussion.
- Two to three sentences. Under 40 words is the sweet spot, because long quotes get truncated and you don't control which half survives.
- Attribute with full name and title on first reference: "said Ana Reyes, CEO of Meridian Logistics." Not "the CEO commented."
- The speaker should be the person with standing. CEO for company news, the hiring executive for a hire, the practitioner for a data story. Journalists may follow up with the quoted person, so make sure they'd survive the call.
Yes, you can write it for them
Open secret: most executive quotes are drafted by whoever writes the release, then approved by the executive. That's fine and universal. The craft is drafting something the person would plausibly say out loud, so read it to them, let them roughen it up, and keep the roughness. An executive's edit that makes a quote less polished usually makes it more printable.
Where this fits in the bigger build
The quote typically lands after your core facts, around paragraph three of the standard structure. If you're working from one of our templates, say a new hire or product launch, the quote slot prompts you for perspective and stakes, not "thrilled," precisely because of everything above.
The bar, one more time: if a journalist deleted every fact around it, would the quote still tell them something? If yes, you've written the rarest thing in PR: a quote somebody might actually use.
RepuPR's builder prompts you past "we're thrilled" on every release. [See how it works](/how-it-works).