For decades, the press release has been the bread and butter of the public relations world. A neatly packaged bundle of company news and messaging, ready to be plucked up by hungry journalists and served to the masses. But in recent years, this once reliable PR workhorse has become a lumbering, ineffective beast – overstuffed with corporate jargon, marketing fluff, and mind-numbing detail.
Looking for a press release distribution service?
News By Wire is rapidly growing into one of the worlds leading press release services with a growing database of UK, USA, European and Asia-based journalists & news desks waiting for you to share your press release.
The vast majority of press releases today are virtually unreadable to the average person. And even for their intended audience of journalists and industry analysts, they have become more of a nuisance than a useful tool. Reporters’ inboxes are flooded with these turgid, self-congratulatory announcements that bury the lede under layers of buzzwords and boilerplate filler.
Many press releases are absolutely useless. They are too long, terribly written, and lacking any actual news value. 99% of them get ignored by many journalists.
It’s a shocking indictment of what was once the PR pro’s sharpest sword. How did such a vital communications instrument become so dull and ineffective? In my 15 years in the public relations trenches, I’ve seen this sad devolution firsthand. The press release’s demise, I’ve realized, has been a slow-motion car crash caused by three key factors:
- The rise of corporate oversight and approval processes
- The insecurity and insulation of PR professionals
- The field’s obsession with outdated writing conventions
Let’s take a look at each of these forces that have corroded the press release into an often useless relic.
Corporate Approval Purgatory
In the early days of my career, the press release approval process was relatively streamlined. I would draft the release, get a few rounds of feedback from my client’s marketing team, and we’d be good to send it out.
But over time, more and more cooks were added to the kitchen. The release would get kicked up to the VP of comms for review. Then the legal team would get their red pens out. And of course, the C-suite would need to sign off. What started as a breezy 300-word announcement would bloat into a 1,000-word monster, stitched together with clunky corporate verbiage.
By the time a press release makes it through all the obligatory approval layers, it’s been utterly drained of any personality or newsworthiness, the original draft has been picked over by so many people determined to leave their mark.
This endless stakeholder daisy chain is a big part of why most releases today are so turgid and joyless. Each approver puts their own leaden stamp on the content until any shred of human style or voice is pounded out.
The Insecure PR Pro
Of course, PR professionals themselves are not blameless in this devolution. We have enabled and even embraced the descent into impenetrability.
For many in the PR ranks, there is a misguided belief that dressing up their announcements with corporate gobbledygook and buzzword bingo makes the content seem more “official” or “serious.” Using phrases like “best-in-class solutions” and “next-generation platforms” is a crutch that allows insecure PR people to pose as important stakeholders instead of just skilled writers and communicators.
There’s this notion that if you don’t make your press release completely incomprehensible with jargon, you’re not a real PR pro. It’s a bizarre insecurity that has infused the whole industry.
This insulation and self-importance causes PR folks to lose touch with normal human discourse. Instead of focusing on simply telling a compelling story, they stuff their press releases with corporate buzzwords and back-pats as overcompensation.
Worshipping at the Altar of “Proper” Writing
Finally, the PR field’s religious adherence to outdated writing conventions has contributed mightily to the unreadability of today’s press releases. There is a fundamental disconnect between the way real people consume information in the digital age and the stuffy, formalistic way most releases are written.
Many PR writing tenets that were carved in stone back in the 20th century simply don’t apply to how we process content today. The press release format of dry third-person narration, inverted pyramid style, and just-the-facts regurgitation was built for an era of newspaper writing and ink-stained wretches. It does not translate to how actual humans interact with digital information today.
Communications academics have been sounding the alarm about the press release’s precipitous decline for years now. But their warnings have largely fallen on deaf ears in the industry.
The way we write press releases is completely stuck in the past, students come into university and PR school knowing how to engage audiences through modern storytelling techniques. Then we beat it out of them with all these dusty old rules that have no bearing on current media consumption.
The press release is a broken, ineffective model that the PR field still clings to out of sheer stubbornness, it’s a disheartening example of how an entire profession is failing to evolve.
A Plea for Readability
To be clear, I’m not arguing for the wholesale abandonment of the press release. It still serves a valid purpose as an official statement of record and a foundational asset in a broader media relations strategy.
But the way the vast majority of press releases are conceived and crafted today is fundamentally flawed. They have become bloated, soulless affairs that fail to connect with real people in any meaningful way.
It doesn’t have to be this way. With a few critical adjustments to their creation process and writing conventions, press releases could regain their vitality as engaging, readable documents that actually serve their purpose.
Here are three key ways PR teams can rehabilitate the press release:
1. Streamline the Approval Process
Getting too many cooks in the kitchen has been a huge driver of the press release’s deterioration. PR teams need to simplify their approval workflows to include only the essential stakeholders and minimize rounds of revisions.
More input is not always better. In fact, it usually makes the release more convoluted and diluted. The key is setting clear guidelines upfront about messaging objectives, audience, and voice – then sticking to them.
I recommend establishing a two-person approval process: one review from a product/service expert, and one from a senior marketing/communications lead. That’s really all you need to ensure accuracy and proper positioning, anything more than that risks getting bogged down in corporate quagmire.
2. Write for Humans, Not Robots
PR pros need to get over their insecurity-driven habit of packing their press releases with corporate jargon and buzzwords. This does not make their content more “official” or impressive – it just makes it impenetrable.
Some of the best press releases I’ve ever read could have been written by a fifth grader. That’s not an insult – it means the writer had a gift for simplicity and directness.
The most talented PR writers are those who can take complex topics and make them accessible without diluting the core message. They avoid corporate-speak at all costs and stick to common language that normal humans actually use.
At the end of the day, you’re just telling a story. Don’t get so caught up in trying to impress that you forget how to communicate like a regular person.
3. Ditch Outdated Writing Conventions
Finally, PR teams need to let go of the musty old writing rules that have calcified the press release into an unreadable relic. The inverted pyramid, third-person narration, and just-the-facts regurgitation might have served journalists well a century ago. But they do nothing to engage modern audiences.
We need to stop teaching students all these dusty old conventions that nobody actually follows anymore. It’s not helping them become better communicators and storytellers.
Instead of these outdated tenets, Hoskins and other educators are pushing for a more modern, audience-first approach to press release writing. This means:
- Embracing a more conversational, first-person tone
- Prioritizing narrative storytelling over just listing facts
- Using shorter paragraphs and sentences for scannability
- Integrating multimedia elements like videos and data visualizations • Optimizing for search and social distribution
The goal is to craft releases that actually capture people’s attention and move them to learn more. Not just repackage the same dry corporate boilerplate that gets immediately ignored.
