How to write a press release in 2026: the complete guide

What a press release is (and what it is not)

A press release is a short, third person news document issued by a company or organisation to communicate a single newsworthy event to journalists, editors, analysts and, in 2026, AI search engines. It is written in the reported voice of a neutral newsroom, not in the marketing voice of the company itself. That distinction is the single most common mistake new PR writers make, and the one that kills pickup before the first paragraph ends.

A press release is not an ad, a blog post, a product page, a LinkedIn update or a customer email. It borrows the conventions of news writing because journalists read hundreds of them per week and have trained their scanning patterns on the inverted pyramid structure codified by the Associated Press, Agence France Presse and Reuters more than a century ago. Break the conventions and you break the scan. For a definitional primer, see our glossary entry on press release.

The release has a single job: to give a busy reporter enough verified, quotable, datable material to turn your announcement into a story in under five minutes. Everything in the document is in service of that job. The headline earns the click in the inbox. The lead delivers the news so the reporter can decide in 15 seconds whether it fits their beat. The body adds context and data. The quotes add colour. The boilerplate answers the who are you question. The contact answers the who do I call question.

In 2026, the audience extended. AI engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews now scrape, parse and cite press releases as primary sources inside conversational answers. The Cision 2025 State of the Media report noted that 61 percent of PR professionals track AI citation as a new KPI alongside earned pickup. That does not change the craft of the release, but it raises the bar for structured data, canonical URLs and inline facts. A well written release is now a dual audience artefact: readable by humans, parseable by models.

The 7 parts of a press release

Every modern press release, from a seed funding announcement to an IPO filing, is built from the same seven parts in the same order. The order is not decorative. It mirrors the inverted pyramid: most important information first, least important last. A reporter who reads only the first two parts still walks away with the news.

1. The headline

The headline is a single sentence, under 90 characters, that states the news in reported voice. It names the company, the news verb and the concrete outcome. It is the only thing a journalist sees in a crowded inbox, so it must carry the full weight of the announcement on its own. AP Stylebook recommends sentence case, no ending punctuation, and no marketing adjectives such as revolutionary, groundbreaking or disruptive. Strong headline: PressPilot raises 4 million euro Series A led by Point Nine. Weak headline: PressPilot announces exciting funding milestone.

2. The subheadline

The subheadline is a 15 to 25 word sentence that adds a second angle, a benefit or a datapoint the headline could not fit. It is optional for short news items but strongly recommended for funding rounds, product launches and research releases. Treat it as a second chance to earn the next three seconds of the reader's attention. It sits in italics below the headline on the newsroom page and as a preview line in pitch emails.

3. The dateline

The dateline is the city plus date tag that opens the lead paragraph. Format: CITY IN UPPERCASE, Month Day, Year. For example, PARIS, April 12, 2026. AP Stylebook requires the city alone for major hubs (New York, Paris, London, Tokyo) and city plus state or country for smaller locations. AFP style uses French date formatting. Reuters requires the source country code. Pick one style and apply it consistently. Our glossary entry on dateline lists the conventions used by each major agency.

4. The lead paragraph

The lead paragraph, or lede in US newsroom spelling, delivers the five Ws in 40 to 60 words: who announced, what, when it happens, where it applies, why it matters. A reader who stops after the lead should still know the full news. This is the single highest leverage paragraph in the document. Write it first, then build every other section to support it. Front load the company name and the news verb. Move adjectives, context and background to the body.

5. The body

The body is two to three short paragraphs that add the context the lead could not fit: market size, product detail, customer proof, one or two hard datapoints, competitive framing. Keep paragraphs under four lines each. Bullet lists are allowed for feature releases and product announcements but should not exceed five items. The body is where journalists extract the two or three facts they will use in their own copy, so every sentence needs to be verifiable, attributable and specific.

6. The quotes

Two quotes is the sweet spot. The first comes from a named company executive, ideally the CEO or the functional leader closest to the news. The second comes from an external validator: a customer, an investor, a partner or an industry analyst. Each quote is 30 to 50 words, in first person, and says something the neutral body voice cannot say. A good quote expresses belief, vision, market context or customer impact. A bad quote restates the headline or reads like marketing copy with quotation marks around it.

7. The boilerplate and contact

The boilerplate is the 50 to 100 word About paragraph at the end of the release. It describes the company, its category, its scale, its geography and its positioning. It is the legal and editorial identity card of the issuer, and it is reused across every release with quarterly updates for funding, headcount or geography. The contact block lists a named media contact with direct email and phone, plus a link to a press kit folder with logos, headshots and fact sheets. Our glossary entry on boilerplate covers format, length and update cadence in detail.

Step by step: how to write a press release in 10 steps

The 10 step process below is the same one we ship inside PressPilot's AI writing assistant and the same one we teach in customer onboarding sessions. Each step can be completed in under 10 minutes for a writer familiar with the company facts. Total time for a standard announcement is around 90 minutes, including quote wrangling and newsroom publication. If you work from a press release template, expect to cut another 30 to 40 percent off that time.

1. Validate the news angle. Run the so what test. Only write a release when the news clears one of eight categories: funding, product launch, key hire, partnership, customer milestone, research, award or M and A.
2. Draft the headline. One sentence, under 90 characters, naming the company, the news verb and the concrete outcome. Front load numbers and named entities.
3. Write the subheadline. 15 to 25 words, one benefit or datapoint, sitting in italics under the headline.
4. Set the dateline. CITY, Month Day, Year, following AP style for US outlets and AFP conventions for French and European desks.
5. Write the lead paragraph. Five Ws in 40 to 60 words. Write it first, then build everything else around it.
6. Develop the body. Two to three short paragraphs with context, market size, product detail and one hard datapoint. Paragraphs under four lines, sentences under 25 words.
7. Insert two quotes. One company executive, one external validator. 30 to 50 words each. First person. No marketing filler.
8. Add the boilerplate. 50 to 100 word About paragraph with company, category, scale, geography and positioning.
9. Attach media contact and assets. Named contact with email and phone, plus a link to a press kit folder with logos, headshots and fact sheets.
10. Review, publish and pitch. AP style checklist, publish on your owned newsroom with schema.org NewsArticle markup, then pitch a targeted list of reporters before any wire push. See the press release distribution guide for the full outreach sequence.

A full annotated example

The example below is a fictional Series A release for a SaaS company. It uses all seven structural parts, respects the 300 to 500 word target, and follows AP Stylebook conventions. Annotations in square brackets explain each section's role.

[HEADLINE]
PressPilot raises 4 million euro Series A to scale AI press release distribution across Europe

[SUBHEADLINE]
Point Nine led the round with participation from Kima Ventures and 20 operator angels, taking total funding to 5.2 million euro.

[DATELINE + LEAD]
PARIS, April 12, 2026. PressPilot, the AI-powered press release distribution platform, today announced a 4 million euro Series A round led by Point Nine, with participation from Kima Ventures and 20 operator angels from Alan, Spendesk and Qonto. The funding will be used to expand the company’s journalist database to 10,000 vetted contacts across six European markets and to launch a native Generative Engine Optimization module by Q3 2026.

[BODY]
Founded in 2023, PressPilot helps startups, scale ups and agencies replace legacy wire services with a targeted, AI-assisted alternative. The platform ships credit based pricing from 30 euro per 100 contacts, an AI writer that enforces AP style defaults, and a newsroom that renders schema.org NewsArticle markup out of the box. Since launch, more than 1,200 customers have run campaigns through PressPilot, generating over 18,000 earned pickups according to internal data verified in April 2026.

The Series A comes as the PR software market accelerates around AI-native tools. Muck Rack 2026 State of Journalism reports that 54 percent of journalists now use ChatGPT or Perplexity weekly for background research, and 61 percent of PR teams track AI Overview citations as a primary KPI. Legacy wires such as Cision and PR Newswire, priced between 7,000 and 25,000 US dollars per year, are increasingly bypassed by early stage teams looking for targeted relevance over syndicated volume.

[QUOTE 1]
"Press release distribution has been broken for a decade," said Tristan Berguer, CEO of PressPilot. "We built PressPilot because the alternative was paying 1,000 dollars to blast a release to an audience that no longer reads wires. Our customers get 3 to 5 times higher reply rates on targeted lists, and they do it at one tenth of the cost."

[QUOTE 2]
"PressPilot is the clearest example we have seen of AI replacing an enterprise category from the bottom up," said Christoph Janz, Managing Partner at Point Nine. "The product, the pricing and the team all line up. We are excited to support the next chapter."

[BOILERPLATE]
About PressPilot
PressPilot is the AI-powered press release distribution platform used by more than 1,200 startups, SaaS companies and agencies across Europe. Founded in Paris in 2023, PressPilot ships AI writing, a 5,000 plus vetted journalist database, multilingual support in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, and a transparent credit based pricing model starting at 30 euro per 100 contacts. Learn more at presspilot.io.

[CONTACT]
Media contact: Camille Rossi, Head of Communications, PressPilot
Email: press@presspilot.io
Phone: +33 1 76 44 12 88
Press kit: presspilot.io/press-kit

Total word count, boilerplate included, lands at 398 words. Reading time on the newsroom page is just under two minutes. A journalist scanning the inbox spends 12 to 15 seconds before deciding to open, reply or delete, and this structure gives them the five Ws, one datapoint and one quote in that window.

Writing tips from working journalists

The craft tips below are drawn from the Muck Rack 2026 State of Journalism survey of 2,800 reporters, the Cision 2025 State of the Media buyer report, the AP Stylebook 2026 edition, and internal PressPilot interviews with AFP, Les Echos and Reuters correspondents. None of them are new. All of them are ignored every day.

• Write the lead first. If you cannot summarise the news in 60 words of reported voice, you do not have the news yet. Fix that before you touch the headline.
• Read the release out loud. Every sentence that trips you verbally is a sentence a reporter will skip. Cut it or rewrite it.
• Use active voice. Subject, verb, object. Passive voice inflates word count and buries accountability. AP Stylebook is explicit on this point.
• Kill adjectives. Replace every marketing adjective with a number, a date, a customer name or a comparison. Facts earn trust, adjectives burn it.
• One hard datapoint per body paragraph. Reporters lift numbers, not narrative. A release without numbers is a release without reuse.
• Name the validator. The second quote should come from a person a journalist can Google, verify and call. No anonymous customers, no unnamed partners.
• Localise the dateline. AFP desks skip US style datelines and vice versa. Pick the agency convention that matches your target audience.
• Link to primary sources. Inline links to research, pricing pages, product pages and founder profiles help both the reporter and the AI engine verify facts.
• Attach a press kit. Logos in SVG, PNG and EPS, headshots at 2,000 pixels, product screenshots and a one page fact sheet. Missing assets are a top five reason pitches get dropped.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Burying the lead. Opening with company history or market context instead of the news itself. Fix: move the news to sentence one.
• Marketing adjectives. Revolutionary, groundbreaking, disruptive, innovative, best in class. AP Stylebook flags all of these. Replace with a number or cut.
• First person voice. Writing the release as if the company is speaking. Fix: switch to third person reporting voice. First person is reserved for quotes.
• Undefined acronyms. Industry abbreviations without first use expansion. Fix: spell out on first use, then abbreviate.
• 900 plus words. Long releases get skimmed and dropped. Muck Rack 2026 reports 73 percent of reporters prefer releases under 400 words.
• Zero quotes or four plus quotes. No quote makes the release feel thin. More than three dilutes the story. Two is the sweet spot.
• Boilerplate stuffed with keywords. Over optimised boilerplates get flagged as spam by journalists and by AI engines. Keep it factual and under 100 words.
• Missing contact. No named reporter contact at the bottom of the release. Fix: always list a human name, email and phone.
• No schema.org markup on the newsroom copy. AI engines cannot cite releases that lack structured data. Fix: render NewsArticle markup on every newsroom page.

When to send a press release (and when not to)

Not every company update deserves a release. The so what test below is the fastest filter we know. It costs nothing and saves teams from the biggest reputation risk in PR: crying wolf. A reporter who receives three non news releases from the same sender will mute the domain, and that ban sticks for years.

When the answer is skip, the right format is usually a blog post, a LinkedIn update, a customer email or a contributed article in a trade outlet. None of those burn journalist trust the way a weak press release does. Save the release slot for news the market will actually read.

How to pitch alongside the release

The release is the document. The pitch is the one to one email that convinces a named reporter to open that document. The two are different artefacts, and conflating them is the second biggest PR mistake after burying the lead. A well written release sent with a generic pitch lands in spam. A mediocre release sent with a surgical pitch gets picked up.

A strong pitch email is 120 words or fewer. It opens with a specific reference to one of the journalist's last three articles, states the news in one sentence, lists three fact bullets, offers an exclusive, embargo or interview slot, and links directly to the newsroom release. No attachments. No logos in the signature. No HTML templates. Plain text, from a named human inbox, with a subject line that mirrors the release headline.

Send windows matter. Muck Rack 2026 reports that 68 percent of journalists clear their pitch inbox before 10am local time. Tuesday through Thursday, 8am to 10am, is the highest reply rate window across every beat surveyed. Mondays are burned by weekend backlog. Fridays are burned by end of week fatigue. Weekends are burned by, well, weekends. The full outreach playbook sits in our press release distribution guide.

Follow up discipline is the final lever. One follow up, 48 hours after the initial send, only to journalists who opened but did not reply, with a new angle or datapoint. A second follow up is permitted at day five, only if you have something genuinely new. A third follow up is harassment. AFP, Reuters and AP newsroom etiquette guides all agree on this limit.

Tools that help you write faster

Writing speed compounds when the first draft is scaffolded for you. The PressPilot AI writer takes a 15 field brief (company, news hook, five Ws, two quotes, boilerplate) and renders a full, AP styled, 400 word draft in under 30 seconds. The output respects the seven part structure, inserts the dateline, enforces active voice, and passes GEO checks by default. From there, a human editor spends 20 to 30 minutes polishing quotes and facts before publication.

If you prefer to write manually, the press release template gives you the exact seven part skeleton in a copy ready Google Doc and Notion format. Pair it with the AP Stylebook 2026 edition for usage rules, and the AMEC 2026 measurement framework for post publication tracking. Three references, one structure, and the first draft writes itself.

Frequently asked questions