how to send press release: attract coverage
November 18, 2025
Sending a press release isn't just about blasting out an announcement. It's a strategic process: you need a genuinely newsworthy story, a hand-picked list of the right journalists, and a distribution plan to get it in front of them. The end game is earning media coverage by giving reporters a story their audience will actually care about.
Why Press Releases Still Matter in Modern PR
With all the noise from social media and influencer campaigns, it's fair to ask if the press release is a dinosaur. I've heard people call it a relic, but trust me, writing it off is a huge mistake. When done right, a press release is still one of the sharpest tools in your kit for controlling your brand’s story and building real authority.
Think of it as your official, on-the-record statement. It's more than just an announcement—it's the bedrock content that can shape how people see your company, catch the eye of potential investors, and give your SEO a serious lift.
More Than Just an Announcement
When you really nail the process of sending a press release, you're doing a lot more than just shouting your news from the rooftops. The real magic is in the strategic wins it brings.
- Boosted Credibility: When a respected publication runs your story, it gives you a stamp of approval that no advertisement can ever buy.
- Enhanced SEO: Getting your release published on news sites creates valuable, high-quality backlinks. These links tell Google and other search engines that your website is an authoritative source.
- Narrative Control: A press release lets you set the stage. You frame the story, ensuring the essential facts and key messages are accurate right from the get-go.
And the numbers don't lie. In 2025, press releases are still a go-to for businesses. In fact, 68% of companies say they've seen their visibility improve because of them. Even better, targeting your release to a specific industry can increase your pickup rate by an incredible 67% compared to just sending it out to everyone. You can dig into more of this data over at SEO Design Chicago's guide to press release stats.
The Modern Press Release Process
So, what does this actually look like in practice? Before we get into the nitty-gritty of each step, let's take a quick look at the overall roadmap. This will give you a bird's-eye view of the modern press release journey we're about to unpack.
For a quick reference, here’s a table summarizing the entire workflow we'll cover in this guide.
Quick Guide to Sending a Press Release
| Phase | Key Action | Objective |
|---|---|---|
| Strategy & Timing | Identify a newsworthy angle and the right moment to send. | Ensure your news is relevant and timely to maximize interest. |
| Crafting the Release | Write a compelling headline, lead, and body. | Give journalists a clear, concise, and ready-to-use story. |
| Building Your List | Research and segment relevant journalists and media outlets. | Reach the people most likely to cover your story. |
| Distribution | Choose your channel: direct email, wire service, or PR tool. | Deliver your press release effectively to your target list. |
| Follow-Up & Tracking | Send a polite follow-up and monitor key metrics. | Increase your chances of coverage and measure your success. |
This table gives you a solid framework, but the real success is in the details.
A press release gives you a direct line to the people who shape industry conversations. It’s your chance to provide a clear, compelling story that journalists can use to inform their audience, making it an indispensable part of any serious communication strategy.
How to Write a Press Release Journalists Actually Want to Read
Let's be blunt: even the most perfect media list can't save a bad press release. Journalists are drowning in pitches, getting hundreds every single day. If you want yours to stand out, it needs to be clear, newsworthy, and respect their time from the very first line.
Think of your press release less like a marketing brochure and more like source material for a story. Your job is to give a reporter everything they need to quickly grasp the news and decide if it's right for their audience. No fluff.
The Anatomy of a Powerful Press Release
Every piece of your release has a job to do. The headline grabs attention, the lead delivers the critical facts, and the body fills in the details. This classic inverted pyramid structure is the gold standard for a reason—it just works.
The Headline: This is your one shot. Make it count. It needs to be active, specific, and ideally under 100 characters. Ditch "New Product Launch" and try something like, "Tech Startup [Your Company Name] Launches AI-Powered App to Reduce Food Waste by 50%." See the difference?
The Lead Paragraph: Cut straight to the chase. Your first paragraph has one job: answer the who, what, when, where, and why. A journalist should be able to understand the entire story from this paragraph alone.
Supporting Body Paragraphs: This is where you add the color. Weave in context, data, and quotes that give the story some real depth and build on the foundation you laid in the lead.
Remember, your primary goal is to make the journalist's job easier. A well-organized release that anticipates their questions is infinitely more likely to get covered than a self-promotional ramble.
Bring Your Story to Life with Quotes and Data
Quotes shouldn't be an afterthought. A good quote adds a human element and a unique perspective to your announcement. Forget generic statements like, "We're excited about this launch."
Instead, have your CEO say something with substance: "Our goal isn't just to enter the market; it's to fundamentally change how small businesses access financial data, putting the power of a CFO into the hands of every entrepreneur."
This isn't just about sounding good. Including strong, insightful quotes can actually boost media pickup by up to 40%, according to industry research from sources like PRLab.co. Journalists value that extra layer of storytelling. It’s a crucial part of learning how to send a press release that lands.
Don't Forget the Boilerplate and Contact Info
Every press release needs to wrap up with two non-negotiable elements.
- The Boilerplate: This is your company's official elevator pitch. It’s a short, standardized paragraph explaining who you are, what you do, and your mission. It gives instant context to any journalist who isn't familiar with your brand.
- Media Contact: Make it incredibly easy for them to get in touch. Always include the name, title, email, and phone number of the person available for follow-up questions.
Getting this structure right is everything. If you want to see how these pieces all fit together, check out our guide with a complete press release example and template. It’s a great way to visualize the final product.
Building a Media List That Actually Gets Results
Let's be honest. Sending your perfectly crafted press release to a generic, purchased list is like shouting into a hurricane. It’s loud, probably expensive, and in the end, nobody hears you.
If you take only one thing away from this guide, let it be this: the most critical part of this whole process is building a hyper-targeted media list. This isn’t about volume; it’s about precision. Your goal is to find the right journalists, bloggers, and influencers—the ones who actually cover your world and talk to the people you want to reach. A mass email gets deleted in a nanosecond. A relevant story sent to the right person starts a conversation.
Identifying the Right Contacts
Before you even think about hunting down names and email addresses, you have to know who you’re looking for. Forget broad categories like "tech journalists." You need to get specific.
Are you a FinTech startup launching a new payment app? Your ideal contact isn't just any tech reporter. They’re the journalist who specifically covers financial technology, payment processing, or mobile banking. See the difference?
Here’s where I always start my search:
- Go Niche First: Pinpoint the top five to ten blogs, magazines, or news sites that live and breathe your industry. Comb through them and find the authors writing articles that feel like a perfect home for your news.
- Do Some Social Media Sleuthing: X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn are goldmines for this. Search for keywords like "HealthTech reporter" or "SaaS writer" and see who’s leading the conversation. Journalists almost always list their beat or professional interests right in their bio.
- Analyze Your Competitors: See who has covered your competition. A quick search on Google News will show you which reporters have already proven they’re interested in your space. This is a massive shortcut.
The quality of your media list is a direct reflection of the research you put in. A small, carefully curated list of 20 highly relevant contacts will always, always outperform a generic list of 2000.
Vetting and Segmenting Your List
Okay, so you’ve got a list of potential names. The real work is just beginning. Now you have to vet every single one to make sure they're a good fit. This step saves you—and them—a lot of wasted time.
For each person on your list, you need to ask:
- Have they covered this topic recently? A journalist who wrote about your niche a year ago might be on a completely different beat today. Check their last few articles to confirm they're still in the game.
- Is their audience your audience? A reporter might cover your industry, but if they write for a trade publication aimed at enterprise CIOs and your product is for small businesses, it's a fundamental mismatch.
- Are they staff or freelance? Freelancers can be a huge asset because they often write for multiple publications. Just be aware that their focus can shift on a dime.
Once you’ve vetted everyone, it's time to segment your list. This is the secret sauce for personalizing your outreach later. Group your contacts into buckets that make sense for your news.
Think about categories like:
- By Beat: Tech, Finance, Local Business
- By Outlet Type: National News, Industry Blog, Podcast
- By Relationship: Cold contact vs. warm lead (someone you've interacted with before)
This isn't just busy work. Segmentation is what allows you to move beyond the dreaded "spray and pray" and tailor your pitch to each group. It's how you drastically increase the odds of your press release getting noticed, read, and ultimately, turned into a story.
Choosing The Right Press Release Distribution Channel
So you've polished your press release and built your media list. Now comes the moment of truth: how are you actually going to send it? This isn’t a small decision. The channel you choose has a massive impact on who sees your news and whether it lands with any real impact.
You've got three main roads you can go down: old-school direct email, the broad-net approach of newswires, or the modern efficiency of PR automation platforms. There's no magic bullet here—the best choice hinges on your budget, your goals, and the story you're trying to tell.
Direct Email Outreach: The Personal Touch
This is the classic, hands-on approach. You send your press release directly to a handpicked journalist's inbox. It's the perfect strategy when you're gunning for a feature in a few high-value, top-tier publications.
Going direct lets you tailor your pitch to each person. You can reference their recent articles and explain exactly why your story is a great fit for their specific audience. It shows you've done your homework.
Of course, this level of personalization takes serious time and effort. It's a game of quality over quantity, but a well-crafted personal pitch can make all the difference and cut through the noise.
Newswire Services: Casting a Wide Net
If your goal is sheer volume, newswire services like PR Newswire or Business Wire are your best bet. They specialize in blasting your press release out to a massive network of newsrooms, media outlets, and online portals.
This is the go-to method for widespread syndication, generating a ton of backlinks for SEO, or meeting the disclosure requirements of a publicly-traded company.
But this reach comes at a price, and it's not just financial. The approach is impersonal by nature. In 2025, the cost for a basic country-level distribution can run anywhere from €400 to €1,500. If you're aiming for a global splash, that number can skyrocket to over €9,500. For a detailed look at the numbers, b2press.com offers some great insights into distribution costs.
A strategic choice: A personal email might land you an exclusive feature in a top journal, while a wire service ensures your news appears on hundreds of websites, boosting your digital footprint. Neither is inherently better; they just serve different goals.
PR Automation Platforms: The Best of Both Worlds
A new breed of tool has emerged to bridge the gap between targeted outreach and mass distribution. PR automation platforms, like PressBeat, combine technology with the principles of good PR to manage the entire outreach process.
These tools help you find the right journalists, send personalized pitches at scale, and automate follow-ups, all while tracking who's opening and clicking your emails. It saves a colossal amount of time without sacrificing the targeted approach that gets results.
For a deeper look at the different tools available, this guide on the best press release distribution services is a great starting point.
Press Release Distribution Methods Compared
To make the decision a bit easier, I've put together a quick comparison of the main distribution channels. This should help you weigh the pros and cons based on what you're trying to achieve.
| Method | Best For | Average Cost | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Direct Email Outreach | Building relationships, securing in-depth features, and targeting top-tier media. | Low (Your time is the main cost). | High personalization, better response rates, builds genuine connections. | Extremely time-consuming, limited reach, hard to scale. |
| Newswire Services | Maximum exposure, SEO backlinks, satisfying disclosure requirements. | High (€400 - €9,500+). | Broad, guaranteed distribution to a vast network of sites and newsrooms. | Impersonal, expensive, often ignored by top journalists, low ROI. |
| PR Automation | Scaling personalized outreach, saving time, tracking results and engagement. | Medium (Varies by platform/subscription). | Blends scale with personalization, provides analytics, streamlines workflow. | Can have a learning curve, subscription costs can add up. |
Ultimately, choosing your distribution method comes down to aligning your resources with your goals. A startup launching a new product might get more value from targeted emails, while a major corporation's earnings report is a perfect fit for a newswire.
This decision tree gives you a good visual for figuring out who to contact once you know your story is truly newsworthy.
The key takeaway is simple: match your contact—whether it's a traditional journalist, an industry blogger, or a social media influencer—to the story you're telling and the audience you're trying to reach.
Mastering the Pitch Email and Follow-Up
You’ve got the perfect press release. Now comes the hard part: getting a busy journalist to actually care. Your pitch email is that critical first handshake, the thing that convinces them your news is worth their incredibly limited time. Think of it as the cover letter for your story.
Let's be blunt: blasting out a generic email to a long list of contacts is a waste of everyone's time. It's the fastest way to get your message flagged as spam. Personalization isn't just a buzzword here; it's the only thing that breaks through the noise. The goal is to prove you've done your homework and understand exactly why their readers would be interested in your announcement.
Crafting a Pitch That Gets Opened
Your subject line is everything. It's the gatekeeper standing between you and the journalist's attention. It needs to be sharp, clear, and professional. Forget the clickbait or the screaming all-caps; just lead with the hook.
A solid subject line gets straight to the point:
- For a launch: "PITCH: New FinTech App from [Your Company] Cuts Small Business Invoicing Time by 70%"
- For a data story: "STORY IDEA: [Your Company] Data Reveals Surprising Shift in Millennial Travel Habits"
Once they've clicked, your opening sentence has to immediately justify their decision. The best way to do this is to connect your story to their recent work. A quick mention of an article they just published or a nod to their specific beat shows this isn't a copy-paste job. Keep the body of the email tight—three short paragraphs is plenty.
The best pitch emails are so personalized they couldn't possibly be a template. They build a bridge between your news and the journalist's ongoing conversation with their readers, making it an easy 'yes' for them to cover your story.
The Art of the Follow-Up
Hitting "send" is just the start of the game. Journalists are drowning in emails, so even a fantastic pitch can easily get lost in the shuffle. A polite, well-timed follow-up can make all the difference. The trick is to be persistent without being a pest.
Give it some breathing room. Wait at least three to five business days before you even think about following up. Anything sooner just comes off as desperate and unprofessional. When you do reach out again, keep it incredibly brief and genuinely helpful.
Here’s a simple, non-annoying way to nudge them:
- Reply directly to your original email. This keeps everything in a neat thread and provides immediate context.
- Keep it short and sweet. A simple, "Just wanted to gently bump this up in your inbox in case it's of interest" is often all you need.
- Add value if you can. Maybe you have a new data point to share or can offer a slightly different angle. Don't force this part if it feels unnatural.
If you don't hear back after one follow-up, it’s usually time to let it go. Bombarding a journalist's inbox is a surefire way to burn a bridge. Knowing when to back off is just as crucial as knowing how to send a press release in the first place. Your long-term reputation as a credible, respectful source is what truly matters.
How to Measure Your Press Release Success
Your job isn’t over once you hit “send.” In fact, one of the most important parts of the whole process is figuring out what actually happened next. If you want to understand the real impact of your press release, you have to look beyond simple metrics like email open rates.
True success isn't about how many journalists saw your pitch; it’s about the results that followed. Did you land any media coverage? Did that article drive people to your website? Did you see a bump in leads? Answering these questions is how you demonstrate the real-world value of your PR work and fine-tune your strategy for the next launch.
Key Performance Indicators to Track
To get a clear picture, you need to focus on metrics that actually matter to the business. It's easy to get bogged down in vanity metrics that look impressive but don't mean much.
Instead, zero in on these core KPIs:
- Media Pickups and Placements: This is the big one. How many journalists or publications actually wrote a story based on your news? This is your most direct measure of success.
- Referral Traffic: Jump into Google Analytics and see how much traffic came to your website from the articles covering your announcement. This draws a straight line from your PR efforts to audience engagement on your turf.
- Search Engine Ranking Improvements: Keep an eye on your search rankings for the main keywords in your press release. A good campaign, with quality backlinks from news sites, can give your SEO a serious boost.
- Social Media Mentions and Engagement: Track how often your news is being shared, liked, and talked about on platforms like X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, or wherever your audience lives online.
Essential Tools for Measurement
You can’t track what you don’t measure, and for that, you need the right tools. You don't need to break the bank, but you absolutely need a system for collecting and analyzing the data.
Start with something as simple as Google Alerts to get a baseline for mentions of your brand and keywords. For a much deeper look, Google Analytics is non-negotiable—it's your window into referral traffic and what visitors do once they arrive. To dive even deeper, check out our complete guide on the measurement of PR, where we break down more advanced tools and tactics.
A successful press release doesn’t just get read—it gets used. The ultimate measure of success is when your story becomes part of the public conversation, driving traffic, boosting your search authority, and ultimately, contributing to your bottom line.
By meticulously tracking these outcomes, you turn PR from a shot in the dark into a measurable, strategic part of your business. This data-driven approach doesn't just prove your value; it gives you the insights needed to make every press release you send more effective than the last.
Common Questions (and Straight Answers) About Sending a Press Release
Even after you've got your story down, some practical questions always come up. I get asked these all the time, so let's clear up a few of the most common sticking points.
What’s the Best Day and Time to Hit ‘Send’?
You’ll hear a lot of different theories on this, but after years of doing this, I’ve found a pretty reliable window. The sweet spot is mid-week—Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday.
Mondays are a wash; journalists are swamped digging out from a weekend pile-up of emails. And by Friday, their attention has already shifted to weekend assignments or wrapping up their week.
As for time, aim for mid-morning, somewhere between 10 AM and 12 PM in the journalist's local time zone. This usually catches them after their morning meetings and right when they're actively looking for stories to work on.
Should I Attach the Press Release as a PDF?
In a word: no. Please don't do this. It’s one of the fastest ways to get your email deleted or, worse, flagged by a spam filter.
Reporters are rightfully cautious about opening attachments from people they don’t know. It’s a huge security risk for them.
The gold standard is to paste the full text of your press release directly into the body of your email. Place it right below your short, personal pitch. This makes it safe, instantly scannable, and super easy for them to copy and paste if they're interested.
Is It Okay to Pitch Multiple Journalists at the Same Publication?
Tread very carefully here. Blasting the same pitch to several people at one outlet is a bad look. It comes across as impersonal spam and can cause confusion internally if two reporters think they’re working on the same story.
Your best bet is to do the homework upfront. Find the single most relevant journalist—the one whose beat perfectly aligns with your news. If you’ve followed up and still hear crickets, then you can think about reaching out to a general editor's desk or another writer. Just don't carpet-bomb the newsroom.
How Long Should a Press Release Be, Anyway?
Brevity is your friend. Aim for a word count between 400 and 500 words.
This gives you just enough space to cover the essentials—the who, what, when, where, and why—and include a compelling quote or two without burying the lead. A journalist should be able to scan your release in a minute or two and get the complete picture. Make it easy for them.
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