A media kit (press kit, same thing) is the set of materials a journalist needs to write about you without emailing you four follow-up questions. That's the whole definition. It is not a brochure, not a pitch deck, and not a branding exercise.
The test for every item in it: would a reporter on deadline at 6pm open this and get something they need? Most media kits fail that test because they were built for investors or customers and then relabeled.
The seven components
1. A company fact sheet. One page, scannable, no marketing voice. Legal company name and any trade name, founding year, headquarters city, number of employees, what you actually do in one plain sentence, key customers or market served, funding raised and named investors if applicable, and any hard numbers you're willing to have printed. Include the pronunciation of anything unusual. Reporters use this page more than everything else combined.
2. Boilerplate. The standard 60-to-100-word paragraph describing the company, written to be pasted at the bottom of an article or release unchanged. Have exactly one. The most common mistake is three slightly different versions floating around, which is how a reporter ends up printing your 2023 employee count. There are worked boilerplate examples here.
3. Executive bios and headshots. For the two or three people who actually speak publicly, not the whole org chart. Each bio in two lengths: a 30-word version for a photo caption and a 100-word version for a profile. Headshots should be high-resolution (at least 1200px on the short edge), downloadable as JPG or PNG, and taken in the last two years. Include the photographer credit if one is required.
4. Logos and brand assets. SVG plus high-res PNG with transparent backgrounds, in both a light-background and a dark-background version. One line on usage ("please don't recolor or stretch it") is welcome. A 30-page brand guideline document is not. Reporters need a file that drops cleanly into a layout at 11pm.
5. Product images or screenshots. Three to six, high-resolution, captioned, showing the actual product rather than a laptop on a desk in a stock photo. If you sell software, give clean screenshots with no personal data visible. If you sell a physical product, give one on white and one in use.
6. Recent news and coverage. Your last few announcements with dates and links, and a short list of prior coverage: outlet name, headline, date, link. This does two jobs: it shows other journalists have vetted you, and it stops a reporter from writing something you already announced eight months ago as if it's new.
7. Contact information for a human. A name, a direct email, and a phone number answered outside business hours, with your time zone stated. Not "press@" with no human behind it, and definitely not a contact form. Also state clearly who can speak on the record and about what.
Optional, if genuinely relevant: a short data or research summary if you publish original numbers, and customer references who've agreed in advance to talk to press. Having two pre-cleared customers is worth more than three additional slides.
Where to host it
A page on your website, not a file. The single most useful format is a live press page at yoursite.com/press with everything on it and individual download links for the assets. Reporters can bookmark it, it's linkable from every pitch and release you send, it's indexable, and you can update the employee count without re-sending anything.
Rules for the page:
- No gate. No email capture, no form, no login. A reporter will not fill out a form to get your logo. They will find a low-resolution one on Google Images and use that instead.
- A single "download all assets" zip alongside individual downloads, for the person who wants everything at once.
- Plain HTML text for the fact sheet and boilerplate, so it can be copied and so AI search tools can read it. Text locked inside a PDF or an image is invisible to both.
- A last-updated date at the top. It tells a reporter whether to trust the numbers.
- Link to it in your email signature and at the bottom of every release.
We've written a full walkthrough of how to build a press page if you want the structure.
A downloadable PDF version is fine as a secondary option for a trade show or an email attachment when asked. It should be a supplement to the page, never the only form the kit exists in.
The bloat to cut
Almost every media kit is two to three times longer than it should be. Things to delete without hesitation:
- The 40-slide brand deck. Built for investors, opened by no journalist, ever.
- Mission, vision, and values statements. No article has ever been improved by them.
- Founder origin stories longer than 100 words. The interesting part will come out in an interview.
- Awards nobody has heard of. A "Top 50 Emerging Companies" badge from a pay-to-play list makes you look less credible, not more.
- Marketing adjectives throughout. If your fact sheet contains "revolutionary", "innovative", or "game-changing", a reporter's read of your credibility drops before they get to the numbers. They're reading for facts, and adjectives are noise that hides them.
- Testimonials and case studies. Sales assets. Different audience.
- Videos over 90 seconds. A short b-roll clip or product demo is useful. A five-minute brand film is not going in the article.
- Anything you'd have to correct later. Don't put a growth rate in the kit that you'd be uncomfortable seeing in print in nine months.
The finished thing should be readable in four minutes and complete enough that a reporter could write a competent 400-word story about your company using nothing else. If yours takes twenty minutes to get through, it's a website, not a media kit.
When to build it
Before you need it, which means before your next announcement. The worst possible sequence is getting a reply from a reporter at 4pm asking for a logo, a headshot, and your employee count, and spending two hours assembling it while their interest cools. Kits take an afternoon to build and five minutes a quarter to maintain.
One honest caveat: a media kit doesn't generate coverage. It removes friction from coverage that's already happening. If nobody is asking about you yet, your problem is upstream. It's whether the news is newsworthy and whether the right reporters know it exists. Build the kit anyway, because it's an afternoon, but don't expect it to do a pitch's job.
Ready to put news behind the kit? [See how RepuPR works](/how-it-works).